Please welcome to the podcast James Kahn, author of the novelizations for The Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Poltergeist, and Return of the Jedi, writer/producer for television series Star Trek: Voyager and Melrose Place, as well as his new crowdfunded independent film project, Wrongside Bob. James discusses with us in his words what it takes to conquer the white whale and reinvent yourself with creative career changes shifting between emergency room medicine and creative writing.
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How you doing. I’m doing good. I’m not having a busy life these days and I was good. OK well that’s fantastic. Working on that currently by my writing project is a script I wrote called wrong side Bob which is inspired by a CD I did a couple years ago called man walks into a bar. The CD was a concept album in which each track on the CD was about one of the characters in this bar on this given fateful night. So and each of the songs was the genre of the song differ depending on who the character was. They’re all basically Americana but now some word countries old folks of Blues young drool story merit of path through the you know yeah they’re all they’re all story songs and on the album it’s about how they’re each of their stories are to mingle and crossover and then there’s a kind of big metal story that connects them all at the end. So so I initially what I wanted to do actually was make this stage a local stage production musical and and so I played around that for a while and then and then I decided I would just go the route of making a little independent film of my own. I produced a small indie feature a couple years ago and that was that was the first feature I’ve produced I’ve produced television for many years but it was OK I was kind of proof of concept for me that I could produce a feature films I decided to go for them and I took one of the characters to the characters actually in the album and made them the main characters sort of a buddy film in a way and now I’m just in awe of the long slow sometimes sideways process of trying to put together a film production juggling cats. Well it sounds a little bit like you’re trying to do music but you can’t. Or writing sort of like a character story line plot is the television style and exotic are actually in the. And I’m basically I’m a storyteller I think of myself as a storyteller so whether I’m writing music or novels or screenplays or whatever it is or just telling jokes. That’s kind of what I do and so you sort of like meandering and something. Is it just like the winding road of giving a feature film or says Yeah well I don’t think of meandering exactly but it’s but it’s you know one step forward and two back and then three to the side and fall over and then nothing happens for a couple weeks and suddenly some big things happen and there’s no I wouldn’t call myself a control freak Exactly. You know I like the sense of actively pursuing something that I’m doing and I tend to just ordinarily do things that I can to do well and this is the first thing in a long time that I clearly don’t really know how to be a film producer but I’m pursuing it anyway and it’s you know it’s a learning experience it’s stressful it’s fun sometimes it’s it’s depressing and frustrating. Interesting what’s great from him you are were you in your sixty’s and just never stopping challenging yourself right. Yeah of reinventing myself a lot you know I started out as a as a doctor an emergency room doctor right. And I did that actually really I started out as a writer when I was in a nine years old I used to read amazing stories tales from the Crypt comic books and find things in the stories that I didn’t like or I wanted to change that I would rewrite them along in my little nine year old scrawl of my notebooks and create my own story so that I started from a young age felt like I was a storyteller. But at some point I realized I really couldn’t make a living doing that. So also liking science and biology I decided to go to medical school so I was a doctor a professional. The first man that led me into actually I was a novelist kind of while I was a doctor in the novels of the novels took off and that led me into a screen and television screenwriting career I just never live the dream director exactly in the moment like when you’re suddenly seeing like two lives kind of compete with each other and who was just pulling your hair out or was it just always it’s always kind of a really scary and exciting moment for us to realize it’s something that you want to do then to get to the point where you could actually decide he’s of OK I’m going to do this and then actually do it it’s like you know leading to the fire clears over a distance you never quite sure turn out yet if we look to any old math or sort of camp or anything it’s making believe is the most necessary step right. Yeah yeah exactly and you know and realizing that there are times when you’re going to crash. What do you think of television these days having been a part of the big drama winding bits of all of our recent past. You know I I love a lot of television these days are for me kind of since I think in America since The Sopranos the show that I loved and it feels to me that I was like a kind of a turning point in television it gave people of the sort of permission to write a really edgy. What were otherwise previously theatrical kinds of screenwriting write them and then the acting rose to the level of the writing end and then that brought directors on board and future directors started showing up and you know so that by another really many have been many many really great television series. Yeah. Do you do you think it’s a coincidence just pure coincidence that your surname would be caught and you find yourself in science fiction. Yes and no sort of epic. Destiny placed forward by the I can’t tell you how many people I meet and say I was trying to I can imagine you probably hear this all the time I’m just trying to think how do I bring this up in conversation about being trite. I usually answer No from from Hell’s heart I stab at the ass I spent my last present day just one of those I loved one of the subtleties actually that I loved about the Wrath of Khan was. I think it’s very difficult remember it in detail but it was one of the opening scenes where you’re first introduced to Khan who’s been stranded marooned on this this sort of otherwise abandoned planet Planet and he was in a little shack or it was maybe it was his crashed space ship. And as this passes the cameras panning across his little living quarters you see the small shelf full of books and one of the books is Moby Dick right. And so I always thought that was a wonderful little touch because then he’s quoting and having his final battle with Kirk. It’s you notice that more and more right everyone’s always leaving like a clue to their own allusion. One of yeah yeah. He’s so like fundamentally so Tanneke right. COHEN Like standing purposefully against like all tides for the sake of his own business and I think that kind of it and like like a had in fact is a sort of pure the purity of intention and hatred it’s kind of wonderful as the rest of us are trying to figure out our social order there’s an ego the stanza says fuck that. Yeah exactly and in fact it’s a paradigm I have always loved so well and it never occurred to me actually until this moment it may be one of the reasons as is the similarity in the names structurally I’ve made my my little movie now wrong said Bob. Kind of a Moby Dick structure and it starts with. I mean the short log line is a drifter with unusual who’s struggling to remember his past and since to an old guy is a buyer who’s desperately trying to forget his past. It’s just kind of their story but the way the story is structured is this guy comes into the bar and it’s first person narrative to a certain extent and he starts out with a line that’s very much like Call me Ishmael. You know going to ask this question was the first line calling Bob is that will be actually Bob is the Ahab character. OK It’s is a have and I don’t own giveaways or of how he goes down with his white whale but that’s kind of the structure of the movie. Do you have an enduring White Whale do why. Yeah not to get too personal. Yeah. I see it’s a good question I will think about that when they go back to that one. Yes for sure. So I took a lot of writers and or at least a few few writers few literary agents and they were very unhappy with new stuff i like they do you have an opinion. Do you think. Yeah I’m kind of disappointed in it and I’m happy it’s. I mean are there are some things I really like a lot. Like I loved the first Matrix film. I’m terribly disappointed at the sequels which I really really should get around to making some sequels of that movie there’s a real opportunity for a wife and she has you know I have great ideas was the goals then we as I recall and Star Wars is I don’t even think of it as as I fired. It’s more of just of kind of a fairy tale fantasy adventure. And you know some of Star Trek I thought you know treated some science I things really well and the whole kind of from is behind all of the Star Trek franchise is all well. As to examine sort of issues of our current culture and through the lens of science fiction and when science fiction is done best that’s what it does now. Cedric certainly you know by no means always exceeded the depth that I think it was a noble endeavor. Absolutely. Star Trek it’s it’s one of the ones that I grew up with and everyone cites it as this sort of like Prado inspiration if you like the reboots from the movies I did a lot of J.J. Abrams takes on them and he really fuse that kind of enthusiasm in them then they see very optimistic about ways to do with the Star Wars reboot it comes out of the December point because like in my fanboy perspective like I want to go back into a fight against Star Wars like back and forth and I feel like rival directors could really bring out that culture but I’m not sure a fight between Star Wars and Star Trek. Exactly like it so it won’t be looked as a step up it would be like parallel to these places enough they’re not comparable because one is a horse once but then one is a fantasy adventure. Yeah yeah but they all they’ll congregate the same conventions the rights was the best place for a street fight to break out over an action going to I was at the Star Wars Celebration a couple months ago and in July I’m going to the the Houston Comic-Con which is going to be about other things. A Star Trek sort of the gathering of All Star Trek actors. How do you like conventions like as they seem very both fantastic to be and I’ll put for fans but also very strange and yeah and I don’t like them much I’ve been to a few world comes and there is so there’s so much distraction there’s no way I don’t think for anybody to get in that connection anyway. Deeply as the the Star Wars convention. Just an Anaheim was a little bit different because it was so huge and there was so much excitement it was so overwhelming and just the terror of that kind of took over the whole event. In Atlanta we do have a there’s a memorial or Labor Day I forget which one to some but it’s Dragon Con that’s approaching right now I want to kind of it’s funny because that happens at the same time as the S.C.C. football opener. And so the exact same hotels are booked with both and it’s horrid. So it’s chocolate nerds all over again and neither of which understand each other because I love it very much as it is pretty much unrelated but. But for about six or eight years I lived in Northern California in an area called the motherlode country which is approved for United where the where the gold rush happened back in eight hundred forty nine. And one of the and there’s still a lot of old gold miners living out there and talent Jason is called Angels Camp and it’s actually the talent that Mark Twain wrote the short story The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County because every you know the story that your story actually now is one of Twain’s early these famous short stories and it was about a Qantas that actually happened in this little little sleepy town which is there it would be a jumping frog contest whoever everyone would bring their own pet particular Jumping Frog. And when money was that it was a huge betting thing but the short story was about one of the characters who secretly of his opponent’s frog buckshot B.D.’s Oh this is all coming back to me from I’ve grown out of a so and so that the lead Laden fried last of course cuts to now the contest still happens every year in this little town it’s a big deal in the town but because of the name. The town is Angels Camp California Hell’s Angels have taken over that town as their annual meeting site so the last weekend in May every year thousands of jumping frog enthusiasm and thousands of Hells Angels converge on this town to have their annual meetings. It’s pretty funny that is so amazing. Oh my God I’m like I just think that’s still lightweight like literary dorks were in love with old Mark Twain stuff but this is hell right this will be the one guy in the group who loves Hunter Thompson and he will have his Bible and exactly exactly. When I was out there as I was still working as an emergency room doctor at a local hospital Twellman General Hospital. So that weekend was full of strangest kinds of accidents and fights and bizarre things you can imagine my goodness. Actually I have heard that I have heard that Grady in Atlanta ranks in the highest for trauma centers in the country thanks to the gang violence of the ninety’s. So I think there’s always you know they were back and actually a trained L.A. county hospital wishes at that time and it was the diseases that or Israel will probably understand reason right. Yeah yeah and in fact it was so so bad. Army battlefield surgeons train there because of the close of the battlefield conditions you can get in a training program and save what year was that I was seventy six seventy seven. OK it might have been a war zone back now and I don’t know the history of the world in which was didn’t feel safe to monitor or that basically just great job training. Oh it was great. It’s a young man’s game I don’t do it anymore but it was great fun it was kind of commando medicine and there’s one there was a couple moments over the year that it was not safe once again we’re actually follow the different gay members into the E.R. There was a fight in the air. That’s kind of scary. It’s actually not sort of sounds like Sons of Anarchy. I can’t really I’m sure that he’s always in the hospital has used a macro you know. So you list you know warrior princess in your about me and frequently but you wrote it was just a small writing contribution or were you part of the sense that Genoa is just a one of a role and script. OK cool because I just remembered I know it’s reflecting It’s funny how as an actress you so typecast but doesn’t know using We well and you know on like in Parks and Recreation scenes of being Ron Swanson’s wife right. You know go figure it’s perfect because who else who else could Ron handle other than Xena Warrior Princess. Right exactly the episode that I wrote was kind of inspired by an old late fifty’s early sixty’s movie star core and I think naked prayer the naked Hunter as a Korean wild movie where he’s he’s a big game underneath takings. So hunters around in Africa and they’re caught by some tribe who kills them all and they take of all his clothes and throw as Spears far as they can and make him start running and as soon as you get as far as this where the spear is landed they all start giving chase and the whole movie is after that is without dialogue just this guy trying to live in the wilds of themselves being chased by by natives with bows and arrows sounds like and sounds like a predator meets Apocalypto. Exactly exactly so it was a very unknown but very cool movie. RICE Well was the plan to have Lucy Lawless running make it from either one or two of catnaps someone and gone through it. I wish that she actually ends up I think saving the Jews can get captured by the tribe. Oh right although I think I think these days I would go over better. Right but they’re just a giant. I think where they had a body double. Isn’t he your Heatley was this giant walk of shame for Game of Thrones was so new the entire time I actually sort of never got into Game of Thrones. People are horrified to hear that but I’ve tried it a few different times and I don’t I was never struck me. OK The first one I saw was season two upset one the first thing I saw was Stan it’s breathy and burning idols of his previous gods and I just thought OK you know I’m there I can buy into this. And from that point between second and third season this was the sprint to read every book because you can’t stop. Are you still writing fiction novels or do you have any new. Yeah yeah I just had a novel released last fall called in Kearny so reincarnation thriller by Premier press and it’s it’s pretty good at some point today. But for now it’s just a novel and then I have a kind of really rough draft of a detective novel a murder mystery which has been sitting in a drawer for a couple years just waiting for me to do my final draft on it. OK You’re pretty deep into it. Has writing been in your experience has been kind of an easy process or want to battle personally. Well if it’s that I love one of my favorite quotes is by the author the German author Thomas Mann who said writers are people for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. And that’s what I feel on the one hand I can’t not write. It’s pretty much a compulsion and the only time I feel I can get any solace when I’m when I’m in stressful times of my life is if I kind of ignore everything else is going on and just sit down and write. On the other hand it’s very hard and you know it just takes it all out of you. I don’t know who it was but I think an American paraphrase that quote me etc I don’t know a single writer doesn’t have trouble with writing. Yeah exactly. It’s really like bleeding your brains out onto the page you know that transition from this being like a person of society into it being a job. I know this is you are like the veteran at this point but do you recall just that anxiety of the man suddenly out when you’re being a personal commitment. I personally never felt that I mean there were you know when you’re on a T.V. show that the train is just rolling really fast and you can’t stop to to agonize over every line you’re right and sometimes you do things you really like into the things you do things not so much. Although interestingly the constraints of television both in terms of time and page counts forced you to turn things out there is sometimes much better than you would have done so you have to get something out that’s going to be shot the next morning. You can pause and you have to just forge through and you come up with things just kind of out of the depths of your your soul or your mind that are kind of brilliant sometimes and that you never did the leisure to kind of just meandering around and and noodle with things you would probably not have come up with. And similarly if you know you have you find you have to cut five pages because because it’s got to be a certain number of pages and the show has to be exactly forty four minutes long. It feels like How can I possibly cut five pages and then sometimes you find this really interesting show I would never have thought of otherwise. Well now that’s your director. In future are you seeing like you know things that you’re in love with on the page suddenly not having time for the actual shooting out of this is not only not having time for a lot of times things are just beautiful on the page that beautifully written and you love them on the page and then you get them on their feet or hear actors read them and you go that doesn’t work at all in real life. So it’s just it’s a really interesting collaborative process with a lot of feedback and you know they put to mind about the issues of writing I think in television shows where it’s not exactly you know your heart’s tired to your core you know I was once on a show a writer said you know every writer has taken boil down to a single line that underpins everything they write no matter what the genre is the writing even if the script is not about that line particularly all over somehow something thematic Lee about that informs whatever script you’re writing and we all we all kind of scoffed at first but just you miss all of us so we had a line by line was the masks we wear and going back and looking at all the you know I’ve written sitcom and cited five soap opera and horror and all kinds of things I can find characters and all those who will feel that that notion or sometimes underlying themes of the whole script. So it’s an interesting process. I suddenly feel like I have a clearer picture of what incarnate looks like now. Between now and it’s all about the mask we were absolute and whatever movements might emerge around and what they expect of you of the persona you project versus whatever happens. So there’s a moral to that just always being true to herself is behind it. Well it’s not it’s like that’s the those are things that come out in your writing. Oh yeah whether what you are not whether you’re conscious of it or not it’s not a question of you trying to be true to it. To question of that’s what informs you as a writer and that just comes out on the page because that’s where you are OK. I’m very I’m twenty mind right. So the thought of like oh there’s a sentence of sums you up to look at for a moment I’m almost defensive. Right well that’s the way all of us what we all scoffed when he said that and then you know one by one you know one of them said OK well mine is I’ve got a secret. Another one said Well mine is life changes in a hurry you know and everyone had a very different but very coherence kind of an over to life philosophy is as much as just the way the way you look at the world and we’re going to hear at least P.R. wise with so long as you know what that is. You will do so much you just drive at least what if you want to make a creative career what you will be known as and what don’t you know want to place or just an opportunity. Right and I was nice about my life my stage of life now as after you know spending twenty years infusing other people’s stories with with that piece of me. It’s nice not to be able to sit back and say OK well what what’s my story you know what was a story that’s all mine. That kind of really represents how I feel how I see things and until that and that’s the musical Moby Dick Yeah yeah exactly. Now we’ve had some time do you think you know to write well and I’m in no way telling stories is my way. It’s like that’s the thing that that’s that that always and sort of obsessed with it. I’m always drawn to it. There are times when it’s it will take over my life and in the middle of a script sometimes I think completely obsessed with it and all writes you know ten twelve hours a day and it really pisses my wife off because I’m like. It ignore the whole rest of my life in this like my life is coming crashing down around me but I can’t stop writing. That’s right there is. So I actually was listening to at least I was in your first song kind of like a bluesy country bluegrass style. And which one is OK as what was it I think was the first one that appears on your website. OK that changes sort of monthly so last year when she was all right. But lawyers say some of them are blue some of them are bluegrass our countries are folk I did have a funny experience in Dublin where I found a group of they were folk musicians from Ireland doing bluegrass. Well I loved it and I thought exactly the same kind of thing there are people first of all doing a lot of American forms or people doing American jazz folk and bluegrass like that surprised me. Exactly but then you get like this weird sort of maybe Irish melody kind of thrown in there. Yeah exactly. Because a really sort of special kind of fusion something you get with punk rock. Yeah yeah exactly. I loved just because it was infused with music everywhere. I just went down there a couple years ago and we just did a poll of the music crawl up the west coast from Dingle to do and to go away to West Cork and then we went over to double it again. Every little tiny pump in every you know town with a thousand people in it you want to get in there were people playing this fantastic Irish traditional music it was just as moving you know when I wasn’t double I did stop at the Guinness storehouse tour yes I have. And yeah and it’s a neat place but like so in Atlanta we have the World of Coca-Cola. Right right. So it becomes a very easy comparison to see the cultures where here you walk in and it’s nothing but commercialism but a pure happiness right. Yeah six such simple advertise and so on. We’re so happy to. Be able to share with you you know and you walk into the Guinness storehouse and the first thing you see one it’s poorly lit till it’s got like the sound of industrial equipment coming out of the speakers and it was just funky. Yeah and like pictures of old laborers wanting the walls and Chambers line and you realize this is how the Irish see themselves. Yeah exactly. Life is going to be hard. You’re going to put in a hard day’s work nothing to be fair but at the end of the day you’re going to get a Ganesan you’re going to feel good about it exactly exactly. And I’d always these workers are like Craftsman you know making barrels. Yeah and it’s that wonderful kind of existence. Apparently I remember also the Jameson tour a member they were saying like Cooper ring has become an actual professional again now. Now that craft beer is trying to age all their stuff inside it look at that and they get us all comes in these steel canisters that which they call iron lungs. That’s right. Anything you’re really excited from and upcoming from other television or movies or friends or let’s see my. The kid who is my personal assistant when I was writing producing Star Trek Voyager His name is Terry in the talents now has his own show I’m so proud of and it’s twelve Monkeys on the side. All right so so and it’s just Season two is starting this week and next week I think. But he was a great guy and I’m so happy that he is not all the way to the top to to be a show creator. That’s fantastic television is I was going start rambling and I know unlike move also you’re welcome to like I said tangent unlike movies which are a director’s medium television is really a writer’s medium right. And the whole power structure of television is is driven by writers. So when you when you first start out you become like a low level staff writer at T.V. show and. You’re assigned one script at a season and you sit in a little world in the right usual story of incompetence and then if you come back the next year because they like what you did then you’re elevated to what’s called a story editor and then after that you become a co-producer and then a producer than a supervising producer and then a co-executor producer and each elevation brings with it more. We’re producing responsibilities. So initially you know you’re allowed to sit in on the casting sessions for the script that you wrote and then you’re able you’re allowed to sit in on the music spotting sessions during post is that in on the tone meetings with the director to give the director a direction of the how to direct that episode. And finally reach become executive producer and that’s the person who really runs the show us the showrunner and then and then after that then you start pitching your own shows to networks and production companies and then your show creator and of one of them gets bought and you create a show is a show runner and you get to pick all the writers and producers who work for you shall start over again for the next iteration of a pickle. What have you seen at least the cycle change for change at all between them since the ninety’s and some ways yes in some ways now the latest changed most is there’s so many more outlets for producing television you know it used to be there were three or four networks and maybe a cable station or two and house just exploded. So I used to be there Was it incredibly structured sequence of events on how this was done and it was you know over the summer. Writers would write their respect pilots and pitch them onto to the networks and the networks would choose so many of them to get it actually written and then over over the fall they would choose which of those were going to be produced. Yes And then in January those those whittled down piles would actually get produced in the pilot episodes and then over the spring they would decide which of those pilots would get turned into a real series and be given a green light and then over the summer the show runners would assemble their writing team and assemble the whole crew the D.P.S. and the directors and some people and spend the summer a whole summer writing the scripts that we’re going to start getting shot towards the end of the summer and then aired in the fall and that was it work that way. You know it was like a machine right. Like machine for decades and now that’s kind of all out the window picked I was picked up and shows are picked up and shot and produced and aired any old time during the years so it’s just kind of a rolling process now. I remember maybe ten years ago especially during the most recent strike of writers you know like it seems like there are opportunities or certain details are making harder but now it’s what everyone’s trying to push. More dramatic content right. Yeah yeah yeah it’s really I mean there are some financial ways in which shows both beneficial to writers but also as an excuse for the studios to let out to drop a lot of rot lot of writers under very expensive contracts and writing contracts that never well enough to meet that level again on the other hand it just exploded the cable opportunities for writers to write for less money. But just so many more places to write for. I’m serving as a different answer at every point in my life. But for you. Bigger bigger payout versus more dramatic writing which would be better for you personally. Oh really much better now. I mean I’m I feel kind of through television or I don’t really I’m not interested in doing television anymore is like that. There Done That. But for for eight years we’re just starting out now I think it’s a much much more fertile ground for them to jump into it much more accessible to find something to write. We have in Atlanta the opportunity to talk to a lot of people. One group actually kick started and self financed on pilot. And they actually became a finalist at the pitching competition in Austin for that. That’s great nice in a while just seeing the entire system change. Right now Tim is created on their own. Hell I think the most notable story is it’s always sunny in Philadelphia who went through no procedure whatsoever they just got in from executive size I’m just like oh OK put it on. Right exactly. That’s that’s pretty rare. Yeah you probably shouldn’t come in expecting that right. Yeah exactly. So what makes bad T.V. in your opinion or bad writing in general. Well I mean there’s still a lot of that on it’s very it’s formulaic I mean even even you know prime time Raw just shows that are on now they’re very professionally done and the acting is good and the production values are very high. Well you know a lot of them I can you know predict what comes next and there’s a kind of feel about them that’s very television. And and it’s it’s really one of the nice things about cable is is the ways in which it breaks out of them all and is able to try new and different things which don’t always succeed certainly but. But when they do they’re great. Yeah I just saw that they’ve canceled hand a lot for three seasons which was a little sad but at the same time. Just amazing that I had that opportunity for that end of story to be that big is a great show runners. Bryan Fuller who wrote it was on Star Trek Voyager that year that I was there. Really. Yeah that’s fun. His last kind of baby writer Ben you had after that show went down he went on to to get his own show which was put I think Pushing Daisies was the first on right only I was following more substance and finally the nudges I was looking at one of my CD covers here. OK that is a way in which my songs I music is really that are the closest writing to my heart. I feel like I move myself more with my music writing than I ever did with most of my T.V. or novel writing. And if there’s a way in which you know you have to be very spare and sparse with the words and cut right to the quick and it’s more poetic it’s more about images or slimes. Well it’s poetry right. Yeah yeah a lot of books not a speck of that like silence actually and I like particularly liked Well Shakespeare of course but also Robert Frost science I always remember when he was asked why he preferred the science for him to reverse or blank verse. He said writing poetry without me to arrive is like playing tennis without a net. Well again as it kind of reflects back on what I was saying about the constraints that television writing puts on use that if you have constraints that you have to write with you’re sometimes forced to find that a four is or thoughts or approaches that you would never have thought of. There have been no constraints you know that’s actually been like the core of every creative class of ever had right. It was like some artificially placed constraints in order to discover something great. Right yeah you know what so far into like a video game design which was just basically put it imposes many rules you can actually get more fun the more rules you put on it. But and that’s basically what every game in every sport is I mean you know it’s a point of goals is to drop this little ball in the hole. You just pick up the ball and walk over and drop the whole you know it’s not hard to do that but it is all the obstacles you put in front of it. That’s And all the rules deciding how to do that and make it fun. You know gold is a funny example because that’s one of the few ones where you really can’t do better just by getting angry and hitting harder. Well in my experience you do better at practicing either. Well I do a lot. I just love the metaphor of you’re not going to get better at this until you just let you know the swing is just impossible. Right right. What things would you say the wrong wrong side Bob is in just if you could put a percentage on it at least from a photography perspective when I was sort of free pre-production the early stages of trying to raise money in the early stages of trying to get actors for the lead roles and in the early stages I just got a director of photography. I have a producing partner but it’s really just the very beginnings. It’s kind of just you know throwing throwing a few vegetables in the pot and starting to start and see what happens is the same things that in other people for not having perhaps like the rigidity of it going forward or is that just the major of an independent project you know this is completely the nature of it and it’s. It’s not really like anything and then before I mean even my music you know I was I had a rock’n’roll band in college called large children in the Absolute Zero has won and since most rock N roll band for an ultimate So if I write or I’ve ever heard of it is pretty cool. Although we all took turns being large Elsinore or the absolute zero and so I you know I always law. Of music but I pretty much let it drop out of my life more or less for for many decades in the when I had kids you know the only time I did it with the kids was I would sing them to sleep at night and then we had a little family rock N roll band when they were all in high school and that was terrific fun and they all went off to the four winds and left home and it left me feeling like gosh now I really want to get more deeply into my music it’s something that I always loved and really never pursued feeling I wasn’t good enough so I started taking guitar lessons again actually. And the woman I was taking them from and he was killed while she’s an ex Nashville country artist herself. I played a couple of my songs for and she said Oh you’ve got to you’ve got to record those so she can actually with a small producer here and and you love them and it sort of got me going and got me confident of my own songwriting and playing that for the next three years and became kind of an organizing principle in my life you know every Thursday night I would go to the studio and record then for a while every Thursday and every Friday I would go and mix. Have your children also taken creative career paths. Yeah you have to know my daughter is actually in medical school now. Although she was quite a good writer in college I think show some of those too when she finishes that I was going to come full circle we’re going to be running out from the hospital work and suddenly taking off except her focus is much more on saving the world and I never was. Now I have a son who works for Riot Games in Santa Monica because they only have one game which is League of Legends. Right but it’s like the biggest game of the world kind of is online at any given time. So he produces all of their avenge their at their worldwide competitive events. So eased into you know. With Korea and Rio and he does there in Addison to call you sports and gaming has become a hero’s word here I think games. It’s this is voted the thirteenth best company in the country to work for really. Yeah that is so much true there. Whenever a new whenever a new video game of any Can comes out they give everyone in the company a week off and a copy of the game so they can just been playing that game. You know that’s that’s funny because so one of the criticism is going to be a really weird story. OK but I have heard that Tetris as a video game is a elaborate criticism of capitalism from a market with the fundamental core of it being that you are consistently increased in workloads and as officials increased You get nothing back and you never get to see the product of your own labor right. It just disappears in front of you as you perfect it. That’s pretty great and certainly never occurred to me that’s a pretty good. Yeah that just I had I had poets is video game professors so they definitely were looking a little deeper. But then I third kids would do want to slight Elliot is is a junior at Cal Poly and slow settlers of this though he’s doing mechanical engineering corps. Yeah just the outcome of that was getting their own game so so nice that this incredible grind can have a big reward at the right yeah yeah. McHale generic is tricky that is what I I brought out an electrical engineering and I’m finally trying to step into the side and I think I’m a little more creative with the questions I suppose but I think we’re doing the job. Yeah you’re doing good. Well how would you encourage new writers who aspire for television or any other medium. I actually have a workshop in L.A. once called writers’ boot camp and their motto is the secret to writing is writing and and basically if you want to be a writer first of all you shouldn’t do it unless you love writing because doing it to try and be a big make a big career out of it is such a low percentage bets that you’re not going to end of the very happy so you just keep writing and writing and from my perspective the secret to writing is actually rewriting I don’t think I’ve ever done fewer than and fifteen or twenty drafts for any script I ever wrote. I mean except in television when it was you know you had to have you had three drafts and then it was gone but I did the emigrant for myself. You just do draft after draft after draft and it always gets a little bit better after each draft where you need to do is show it to a few close and trusted friends and ask for their their best employees and then take it you don’t have to take every note certainly but when I when I often tell Junior writers is if someone tells you something isn’t working about something you wrote if you really feel strongly about it and feel like this is really core to what you are wanting to write then you can go ahead and keep it the way it is. But if two people tell you it’s not working you’ve got to change it even if the people are telling you it’s not working for different reasons you know someone says well the seat isn’t working because he has to go to her house instead of her coming to his house and someone else’s. Well actually the scene isn’t working because it’s a night that should be in the daytime and I think of the Titans and the Tennessee phrases that well neither of those knows of any to do with each other and these writers you know don’t really know what they’re talking about these no a few years. Summer’s going to ignore those notes because they’re not mutually contradictory but they’re just sort of. General as to mean this is just seen as OK the way it is and really you need to do is the essence of it which is there’s something wrong with this scene. And often people can’t articulate what it is they don’t like about something but they’re bumping on something and you gotta take it seriously. OK that sounds to me like we were in the advice from Kill Your Darlings to euthanize your darlings. Exact So if one person thinks of the prognosis is bad it’s OK you can hold out hope but the moment special Another doctor pull the plug right there is another note which I encourage new writers to take. Is is someone says this scene isn’t working. Rather than either insist that it is working or throwing it out and trying to rewrite it is you need to ask this question you have to say well this is what I was trying to do in this scene. Now isn’t that working because you don’t like what I was trying to do or because you do like what I was trying to do that I’d tell you but I wasn’t doing it well because that will inform how you’re going to rewrite it if you can rewrite it as well. How much of that I want to get the blame on the actors for not working. Not a lot I mean certainly there are you know bad actors or actors do a better job to be richer than make you tear your hair out and you just know the scene would have been great if that would have been able to act it out. But generally the writing shows for where the writing is I think it is funny watching a movie and think someone doing their absolute hardest with something that’s kind of trite. Yeah and you know some Byron because it’s like my God you know that devotion to what you guys and I think we are almost at an hour which means I’m getting pretty good time limit. Anything a scene that you just fell in love with. Recently I’ve seen a sorry mess flick series called Peaky Blinders recently which I loved when I was with. Cillian Murphy when it was exactly and it was one nine hundred nineteen Birmingham England. First of all I love the cinematography I think of some of the best integrate ever seen certainly the television series and anything but I just love the setting Birmingham was was the industrial centre of England in one thousand nine hundred was not only the end right after the end of World War one so there are always people walking around with P.T.S.D. which they call shell shock in those days. But then it was about these you know the rivalries of these gangs the Irish gang in the Jewish gang in the gypsy gang in the Russian gang but it was also the first rise of international Communism. So there always is union organizers and rabble rousers. It was just this incredibly rich mix of conflict and violence. It was it was great. I did want to know in this manner. That’s what’s been very aggressive. Right yeah. Just trying to like net as much stuff as you can you know they’ve really changed the game to you know putting out a whole season two words of things I wanted to really change the nature of television watching. Do you like. Yes And actually and I’m generally that much of a binge watch are also I was watched two or three in a row but rarely more than that. And so also one of the things that ruins that I agree with this is is it ruins sort of the the water cooler talk the next day right in Clinton’s house a card came out he always had to qualify where people were. Exactly exactly and that is instance too bad because I was nice you know the sort of exquisite pains to reach the end of one episode and want to know what happened next but you couldn’t. It will talk about that with everybody. Yeah yeah. Although although there is that has been kind of true books you know video games lots lots of private baby stuff but you don’t get I suppose the whole cultural critical mass that you would of but ten peaks right things actually. Well I mean kudos to them though because everything they do seems to be just I hate to use a word it is an insult in software and everyone over uses disruptive but exactly that you know I will say that I was very impressed and that folks is first original programming house of cards seemed to be an American adaptation of Richard the third as they tried to steal the throne of American television. Actually you’re starting to break up now. OK Well James I’ve had a lot of fun talking with you. OK great thank you a pleasure talking to you. OK Take it easy life. Oh.
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