Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast

“We never wanted to make a show about dogs. We wanted to make a show about people. And then secondary to that, people who love dogs. We made sure we had some of Colin [the dog, in season two], like there’s that lovely episode in seven where Gordon becomes a stage mum to a TV dog, which is so funny. But yeah, we just wanted it to be interesting,” says Harriet Dyer, co-creator and star of Colin From Accounts about the shift away from Colin the dog to focus more on the relationship between Ashley and Gordon, and develop the supporting characters.

In this episode of the Write On podcast, we check in with the real-life Australian married couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer now that season two of Colin From Accounts is out on Paramount+. Brammall and Dyer talk about balancing the tone of the show that continues to have a few scatological elements and misbehaving body parts, but keeps the characters grounded as Gordon deals with a loss. “Episode five is a bit of a departure from the structure of the show and mixes the light and the dark with the comedy butting right up against the tragedy. We played a bit more with that as well. We did stuff that interested us and made us laugh,” says Dyer. 

Brammall also shares his advice for taking control of your creative life. “I started writing plays with a friend of mine because you have no agency as an actor. You’re waiting for the phone to ring. You’re waiting for someone to give you work. You can’t create your own work. And I’m like, well, f*ck this. I want to create work. But you definitely need a big old f*cking dose of luck on the way… And now more than ever, there are ways to make your own stuff and get it out there and produce it. But of course, the flip of that is that there is way more people doing that as well. How does one stand out? I don’t know. All I would say is it’s not going to happen if you don’t start doing it!” 

To find out more about Brammall and Dyer’s writing process, listen to the podcast.

 

“What I wanted to do with this movie was take this interesting relationship that I have been exploring over the course of my writing, over 20 years, and this dynamic, and set it against the backdrop of something so objectively worse than anything the characters are going through. I wanted to put this funny, fraught relationship that seems like the stakes are quite high – are these two people going to continue on together? Against the backdrop of stakes that are so much higher, we can put their relationship into perspective,” says Jesse Eisenberg, writer/director and star of the new buddy movie A Real Pain that takes place on a holocaust tour of Poland.  

In this episode of the Write On podcast, Eisenberg talks about spending years trying to get this particular story just right, how it was personal to him, what it was like to shoot at a concentration camp and the great advice his producer Emma Stone gave him. He also shares his criteria for writing a road trip/buddy movie.

“It has to have an original quality to justify it as a movie. I read so many scripts as an actor and I’ve written so many things, that [a script] has to have two things: it has to be specific enough to feel real and personal. There are just so many movies in this road trip/buddy movie genre, if it doesn’t feel specific I think an audience can sniff it out immediately. The other thing is to make it feel new, to have a new reason to tell this story so it doesn’t feel like something I’ve seen 10,000 other times,” says Eisenberg.    

Listen to the podcast to learn more. 

 

“One of the things that I really wanted to focus on, and I felt it immediately after meeting Lina the housewife in Indiana [played by Betty Gilpin in the show], whose husband no longer wanted to kiss her on the mouth, I felt like this woman was as important as the Queen of England, as important as Napoleon. I felt her dreams and fears are just as universal as someone who has defeated an army and the only reason we're not hearing about her is because we have these sorts of rules in place for what possesses historical significance. And I don't really think that that's necessarily true,” says Lisa Taddeo, author of the book Three Women, on which her new TV show is based. 

In today’s episode, we speak to Lisa Taddeo, creator of the show Three Women that stars Shailene Woodley, Betty Gilpin, DeWanda Wise and Gabrielle Creevy as “ordinary” women searching for their sexual identity and fulfillment in disparate and surprising ways. The show is an intimate, often stark portrayal of forbidden female desire and the consequences of that desire – both good and bad. 

We also talk about writing the “female gaze” into the scripts, filming with prosthetic penises, the power the book Twilight has on teenage girls, and the uncanny way our mothers influence our own sexuality. 

“My mother made up her face every morning, even when she wasn't going to leave the house. Who is she? My father sees her before she puts on her face as they say, so it's not for him. Nobody is coming to the door today, so it's not for them. It's certainly not for me, because I see her without makeup when she washes it off at night. So, who is it for, you know? And that was a question I had but didn't really know how to frame,” Taddeo says. 

To hear more about the groundbreaking show Three Women that’s airing on Starz, listen to the podcast. Trigger warning: contains mentions of sexual explicit material, sexual assault and trauma.

 

“The streaming bubble finally popped, and I think the tip of the spear that popped it was the double strikes we had last year and now we’re calling it the great contraction. It’s a really tough time for up-and-coming writers to break in. It’s tough for everyone, even up-and-coming agents and managers, anyone coming out to Hollywood to pursue a career. It’s one of the toughest times ever, so you need to be patient,” says literary manager Jeff Portnoy, of Bellevue Productions.  

On today’s podcast, guest host Lee Jessup, Hollywood’s leading screenwriting career coach and judge of the Big Break screenwriting competition, interviews Jeff Portnoy, literary manager for Bellevue Productions. They discuss the current state of the industry and how it’s affecting writers. 

“We’ve been encouraging a lot of new writers to focus on features at the moment and explaining how bleak the TV staffing market is right now. So if they have hopes of getting staffed, it’s very difficult right now. Typically, if we had a client who wants to write in the TV space, we’d help them get a TV agent and we, the agents and I, would go out and try to get them staffed. But agents aren’t really signing anyone below mid level right now, so they’re not taking on those up-and-coming writers,” says Portnoy. 

But there is hope considering business trends are always cyclical. Portnoy shares this advice about writing spec features in this climate: “You want to stand out and that comes down to your ideas. The execution has to be great. It’s about choosing ideas that really stand out in a pack – the words I like to use are loud, bold, audacious. Managers, agents, producers – we see thousands of loglines a month and if we see a logline that’s loud, audacious and bold, it’s going to stand out.”

To hear more about the state of the industry, listen to the podcast. 

 

“I think [Here] has some of the imagination of Forrest Gump, but it's not Forrest Gump. It's a different animal. I mean, it has the same kind of humanity to it, which is what I'm pretty good at,” says Eric Roth about his latest film Here, co-written and directed by Robert Zemeckis and reuniting actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. 

On today’s podcast, we speak with Oscar winning screenwriter Eric Roth about the challenges of writing the screenplay for Here that mostly takes place in one room, with a fixed camera that never moves. The movie explores the ordinary lives of multiple generations of families in a way that many will find relatable, heartbreaking and, at times, claustrophobic. 

“I'm not sure [the characters in Here] are extraordinary or not, but they show the length and breadth of what people can and can't do and when they're trapped. I think when it works that way dramatically, it's quite lovely and quite beautiful. I don't want to use the word profound, but I think the [movie] is profound to a certain extent because it is just about the regularity of life. And that, from dinosaurs to the future, it's going to keep going. Hopefully people will find great joy in how they're living and I'm sure great pain too, but I think that's just sort of the circle of life,” he says. 

We also discuss some of his other films like Forrest Gump, for which he won an Oscar, and Killers of the Flower Moon. 

He shared this advice about using subtext in screenplays. “I think that I'm always trying to find a way to enhance the scene with not only subtext, but with some kind of metaphor and make it possibly more interesting as to getting to the root of people's feelings without them having to vomit out what they're saying you know. It's not easy, but I think as I've gotten more successful and more accomplished at it,” he says. 

To hear more of Eric Roth’s advice for screenwriters, listen to the podcast.

 

“Comedy and scares are so similar. I've found that in a lot of my scripts, it's almost like you're taking the peaks and valleys of humor, and the peaks and valleys of scares, and flipping them on each other. So, you have the scare that you come down from for a moment of brevity and humor, or just character work, and then you do another scare. You’ve relaxed them and then scare them again. The effect is that you're making the audience have a good time,” says Seth Sherwood, author of The Scary Movie Writer’s Guide.

In this episode, we speak with Seth Sherwood, writer of horror movies like Leatherface and Hell Fest. He was also nominated for an Emmy for writing the TV show Light as a Feather. I chat with him about the long process of making Hell Fest with producer Gale Ann Hurd, the difference between internal and external horror, and his definition of grounded horror that’s so popular these days. He also gives his advice on what he thinks is the single best thing an emerging horror writer can do to help their career. 

“Right now, the industry is in a retraction, there’s an implosion and streaming is dying. When people ask me now how to break in, I say I don’t know, but I think you’ll never go wrong in actually trying to make stuff like short films. I know it’s a whole other path and it’s a difficult thing to do but people will always watch stuff before they read stuff if they’re not writers. And those people are the gatekeepers. I always wanted to make my own films, but my writing career took off and I'm actually in a spot where I'm going backwards, where I have done so many writing assignments in the last few years but things aren't getting made – s­o, I’m going to go make a microbudget horror film on my own with my friends. The thing that I wanted to do when I was 20 years old. Because at least it's a thing that can be seen. And that has more weight than a script right now,” he says. 

To hear more about horror writing from Seth’s perspective, listen to the podcast.

“We wanted the whole series, but specifically the pilot episode, to lure you in with the kind of comfort and coziness of the 80s nostalgia and the trappings of John Hughes movies, and all of that, while also giving it the 80s heavy metal flavor, and then start to build paranoia and change the vibe a little bit throughout. But we always knew that the series was going to hinge on this scene with Judith [Jessica Treska] where you realize that the beautiful girl next door is actually so much trouble!” says Matthew Scott Kane, creator and showrunner of Peacock’s Hysteria! Starring Julie Bowen, Anna Camp and Bruce Campbell. 

The show explores the so-called Satanic Panic that actually happened in the 1980s at a fictionalized high school in the midwest. When a varsity football player disappears under mysterious circumstances, a struggling teen heavy metal band realize they can capitalize on the town’s sudden interest in the occult by creating a fake Satanic cult – to their surprise, everyone is into it. Things quickly get out of control when the town takes the cult more seriously than the high school band members. 

In this episode of the Write On podcast, Kane talks about delving into the generational fear of teenagers, balancing horror with humor, and writing characters who need “to be seen” by their peers. He also shares details about his journey to becoming a professional TV writer,  specifically the many benefits of being an assistant in Hollywood. 

“The biggest gift of being an assistant – which is not an easy job, it’s very difficult, it’s very time consuming, you have to be available 24/ 7 and it takes a lot out of you – but the best possible thing that you can get, and not all showrunners will do this, is to make yourself available to watch every step of the creative process. Make sure you are in the room while they are breaking story. Make sure you are reading outlines that are coming in. Make sure you’re in concept meetings, tone meetings, production meetings, all of these things that might feel like they don’t have anything to do with writing, but they have everything to do with writing,” says Kane. 

To hear more, listen to the podcast. 

 

“Sometimes I think [the show Pachinko] is almost too personal. I feel like every show, you look at it and say, ‘How much of myself is in this show?’ I did a show [The Whispers] about children who were communicating with an invisible alien force and somehow, I had to figure out how to make it part of me as well. We try to put ourselves in as much of our work as possible. But with this show, the tipping point almost fell in the other direction, where I felt so personally invested. I felt very much like this is my family’s story, as well. That responsibility sometimes felt burdensome. So many of the cast and crew have said that there's a responsibility with this show that almost feels too much. But at the end of the day I think it's a thing that made us work harder. I think the show is as good as it is because people cared,” says Pachinko showrunner and creator Soo Hugh about making the story personal to her.

In this episode, we speak to Hugh about the challenges of writing a show where characters speak in three languages, making the characters relatable to an American audience, and the responsibility of telling the stories of strong women over generations.

“In Korean families, we always have these jokes that everyone knows who’s running the house – your mother! I think it's the strength of Korean women that have just carried us through,” she says.

We even ask Hugh about her work on one of my favorite shows The Terror, and what she thinks really happened to the real-life British crew on the Terror and Erebus ships that got stuck in the Artic ice. Her answer may surprise you.

To hear more, listen to the podcast.

“I think what Tim [Burton] does is he's always trying to simplify. That’s the essence of a classic filmmaker. People think he's wild and crazy and does all these things. His movies are brilliantly composed frames and he's always looking for simplicity. All of his big movies, they're really family dramas dressed up in whatever genre he's in. That's really what they are. And I think people think he’s always strange and weird and likes dark thing, but no! It's a classic story with good drama. And then he brings his sensibility to it,” says about the biggest lesson Al Gough has learned working with director Tim Burton on both the TV show Wednesday and the new film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

In this episode, we speak with writing team Al Gough and Miles Millar about creating the hit Netflix show Wednesday, how they cultivated a relationship with director Tim Burton and how that led to the sequel to Beetlejuice after more than 15 sequel scripts have surfaced over the last 36 years.

Gough and Miles talk about crafting a mother/daughter love story for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and delving into grief, something that all families face at some point or another. The writers also share their insight into adding new characters in the mix and creating the strange yet rewarding musical numbers for the movie that includes one totally bonkers song. 

Miles Millar also shares this career advice about staying in your lane when it comes to genre:

“If you write a spec or a script that sells, and it's a romantic comedy, then you should really stay in the romantic comedy world and arena for a while. We always jumped around which I think hurt us initially. We did an action movie, we did a comedy, we did this, we did that. We did a fantasy. So, pick a lane. I think successful writers usually pick a lane and get known to do one thing – which can be constricting and suffocating, but I think it's something that's important in terms of a career.”

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is out now in theaters. 

 

“I think that Sunny [the robot], as a character, is kind of emblematic of this conundrum we have with A.I. In one scene she is cute and warm and is serving Suzie's [Rashida Jones] emotional needs and is brimming with potential. And that's really enticing. And then in the next scene, she is diabolical, and is going to like, cut a bitch! That is A.I. There are so many great things it can do, and there's so many terrible scary things that it can do. At the end of the day, it's up to us as society to figure out how we're going to use it,” says Katie Robbins, showrunner and creator of the AppleTV+ show Sunny.   In this episode of the Final Draft’s Write On Podcast, we talk with Katie Robbins about delving into artificial intelligence, Japanese culture and making a robot appealing (and frightening) to audiences in her show Sunny. Based on the book, The Dark Manual, by Irish writer Colin O’Sullivan, Robbins says she made changes to the story to allow for exploring isolation and the importance of female friendships.   “I was excited about the idea of giving [Suzie] a couple of female friends. So one is in the body of a robot and then the other is this aspiring mixologist who she meets in the pilot, Mixxy [Annie the Clumsy]… and telling the story of a friendship like love triangle. Mixxy is a little jealous of Sunny's relationship with Suzie and Sunny is really jealous of Mixxy's relationship with Suzie. The film The Favourite was a big influence for a lot of their relationship dynamics. And it was really fun exploring what that is if one of the friends is an A.I.” she says.   To hear more about the show Sunny that’s currently streaming on AppleTV+, and hear Robbins’s advice on writing TV pilots, listen to the podcast.