Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Greg Weissman: But I think the trick to it is that, you’ve got to write every day, and you’ve got to be disciplined about it. You can’t skip a day because I’m without a doubt prone to procrastination, as indicated by my ten years in between my first and second drafts of my novel. So you absolutely have to learn the discipline of writing on a daily basis, whatever that means to you. I don’t need to define it, but you need to be able to sit down and, in a disciplined way, write something every day.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Greg Weissman, has been a storyteller all his life. His first professional work was as an editor for DC Comics, where he also wrote Captain Atom. Greg was director of series development at Walt Disney Television Animation, where he created and produced gargoyles. Later, he wrote the gargoyles and gargoyles Bad guys comic books for SLG and the Gargoyles and Gargoyles Dark Ages comics for Dynamite. Greg developed, produced, wrote, story, edited, and voice acted in Sony and Marvel’s the Spectacular Spider man. At Warner Brothers. He held the same jobs on four seasons of young justice while writing the comics young justice and young justice targets for DC. Greg was a writer and executive producer on the first season of Star Wars Rebels for Lucasfilm and Disney, and wrote the spin off comic Star Wars Canaan, plus Starbrand and Night Mask for Marvel. Greg’s first novel, Reign of the ghosts, was followed by its sequel, spirits of Ash and Foam. He’s also written two World of Warcraft novels and two magic the Gathering novels. For the record, I had the honor of writing an episode of Gargoyles, and am happy to say that in my 20 years of writing tv animation, it remains one of the most popular series that I had the pleasure to work on. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s a true privilege for me to welcome to StoryBeat today the prolific writer producer Greg Weissman. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Weissman: Thanks for having me.

Steve Cuden: Well, it’s a great pleasure to have you here. as we were talking before the show started, we’ve kind of crossed paths all of our careers, but in fact, we’ve never actually worked together on anything, which I always find interesting that you can do that for.

Greg Weissman: I don’t think we ever actually met, even.

Steve Cuden: We may not have, which is amazing, because it’s not that big of a.

Greg Weissman: I’ve known your name for, you know, going on 30 years now, close to, you know. I mean, we just sort of circled each other, never quite connected up. That.

Steve Cuden: That’s correct. So, all right, let’s go back to your beginnings. How old were you when you first got the bug to start writing? Was it based on something or at what age were you?

Greg Weissman: Second grade, maybe before that. I mean, telling stories. I mean, you read that line from my bio, been a storyteller all my life, and that is almost literally true. I was always the kid who, you know, at the camp out was telling stories, you know, things I made up or things, you know, things I’d heard or whatever. but in terms of writing, I mean, this is going to sound silly, but it really started in second grade.

Steve Cuden: Was it in a class or something that you just did?

Greg Weissman: Yeah, but, it was spelling words. We got spelling words. And the homework assignment was to take the spelling words and put each spelling word in a sentence. And I sort of went one better. And I put my. The sentences weren’t random sentences. I wrote little stories. One-page stories. Single page stories. I probably. So my second-grade teacher, and this is probably connected, who happened to be a friend of my mom’s, was just, I guess, tickled by the fact that I didn’t just write a sentence per word, I actually used all the words in a story. And so she, took all the stories I wrote over the year, you know, and she put them in a little book, which I still have. It’s on the shelf over there somewhere. But this is an audio podcast, so if I pulled it out, it wouldn’t make any difference.

Steve Cuden: It wouldn’t make any sense.

Greg Weissman: you know, it was like this prized possession. I mean, from. It was literally the. The feeling. Then second grade, you’re what, like seven?

Steve Cuden: seven.

Greg Weissman: yeah, was, like the feeling I had the first time I got a comic book published or a novel published or a tv episode on. It was like, wow, you know, someone cares that I told this story. And so from that point on, being a writer was literally always the goal. I had other goals as well. you know, when I was in high school, I did a lot of acting. I also did a lot of acting in college. But by the time I got to college, I realized I wasn’t that good. But, I mean, I was decent. I wasn’t horrible.

Steve Cuden: Did you get training as a writer? Somewhere along the ride?

Greg Weissman: All along the way. in junior high, in high school, in college, certainly, and then, you know, you learn on the job. you know that well, certainly just, I started writing comics, when I was 19 for DC. I wrote tons of stuff, stuff I got paid for. None of it got published.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Greg Weissman: Tremendously frustrating.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Greg Weissman: There was always some reason, and it would be a different reason every time. I, you know, I wrote stuff for new talent showcase, and then new talent showcase got transformed into talent showcase. And so all the stuff I’d written for new talent showcase that got shown, and then I wrote stuff for talent showcase. And, then that book got canceled, and so that got shelved. And then I wrote for Supergirl, and then that book got cancelled, and that got shelved. And then I wrote for. I wrote a black canary miniseries where at the end of the miniseries, Black Canary and Green Arrow got engaged. And then Frank Miller’s the Dark Knight return had just come out dark Knight Returns had just come out in prestige format.

Steve Cuden: Right?

Greg Weissman: And Mike Grell approached DC Comics and said, hey, I want to do a Green Arrow book, Prestige, called the Longbow Hunters. And, Dick Giordano, who is my mentor at DC and who I still, I miss and adore to this day, said, oh, that’s great, because we’re doing this Black Canary miniseries. They get engaged at the end of the miniseries. And Grell was like, no, I don’t want that. I don’t want them engaged. And so DC sort of said, well, we’ve got Mike Grell. Keep in mind, this is something like 1985 or six or something, right? We got Mike Grell and we got Greg Wiseman. It wasn’t much of a contest.

Steve Cuden: Not a contest. Were you, did you think early on when you couldn’t get anything to actually go all the way to the end, did you think maybe you were cursed in some way? Did it feel like that to you?

Greg Weissman: I wish. Maybe I thought that. No, I, you know, it was. I got to a point where I’m like, well, maybe I just suck. you know, it’s possible. By the way, there are certainly fans on Twitter right now who would go, yeah, you suck.

Steve Cuden: But that’s true for virtually everybody, right?

Greg Weissman: Yeah, I know that. I just. But, I don’t actually think I suck. It’s funny, I’m actually quite fond of my work. When you’ve been writing for years, and there’s always some reason that it doesn’t get in print. I began to think, well, maybe I just am no good at this. And I went to dick and I said, look, I really, I want you to be honest with me. You know, do you think this is something that I might have a skill for? And he, said, yes. and so I said, okay, then I’ll stick it out. You know, I was on staff at DC for two years, give or take a month or so, and I left that job. I left being on staff there, but I didn’t give up on the writing. And, I went to USC for graduate school and I got my master’s in professional writing. That’s a degree at USC that doesn’t exist anymore. But, you know, I learned a lot there. And then I went to work at Disney, as a junior executive, which I thought at the time that I took the job, I’m like, okay, this will be the day job. And then at night, you know, I’ll come home and I’ll do all this writing. That didn’t happen.

Steve Cuden: It’s tiring. It wears you out.

Greg Weissman: I would, you know, and I did a lot of writing as part of the job because I was in development. So I was constantly writing up proposals and mini bibles and stuff. certainly pitches because, you know, we had to pitch every six months to Michael Eisner.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Greg Weissman: For the Disney afternoon. and, you know, he wanted to have choices. So, you know, we put together between six and ten pitches every six months to pitch to Eisner, and he would pick one or two. And the irony is, at the time, I found that tremendously frustrating because I’m like, he’s killing all these great shows that he’s not letting us do. But what I didn’t get then, that I totally get now, is that, Yeah, that’s true. He was saying no to a bunch of really cool ideas that could have been great shows, but he was always saying yes to one or two. And if Michael Eisner, at that time, at the Walt Disney company, said yes to a show, everybody in the entire organization got on board or got out of the way. Yeah. Michael was like the last of the Hollywood moguls. And he, in those days, you know, later he’d be accused of micromanaging and he’d give stuff up and, to try and, you know, band aid, whatever problems Roy Disney had with his management style or whatever, you know. But, in those days when I was there pitching to him every six months he made all those decisions. What shows are we going to do? Michael decides that ultimately, there were people along the way who could say, I don’t like that idea, and we wouldn’t show it to Michael. But no one could greenlight anything except Michael. But when he greenlit something, it happened. It happened. It got made. And what changed for me in the industry when Michael stopped doing that at Disney and then everywhere else I’ve ever been is that now those decisions are made by committee.

Steve Cuden: And what’s the problem with that?

Greg Weissman: So the problem with that is not dissimilar if you’ve, ever seen one, to focus, testing something. But the main problem is that all these corporations have this culture of fear. Everyone comes to Hollywood because they want to make stuff. They want to make stuff. They actively want to make stuff. And I don’t just mean writers and actors and.

Steve Cuden: No, everybody, everybody, everybody.

Greg Weissman: The executives come because they love this shit and they want to make stuff. Then they get into these companies, and it doesn’t take long. And, in fact, it takes a supreme level of will to avoid the culture of fear that exists at every one of these corporations. And what are they afraid of? They’re afraid of green lighting something that will later bomb. And why are they afraid of that? They’re afraid of that. Not because of the bombing itself, though. That’s bad enough, I guess. But what they’ve learned almost by osmosis, is that if they say no to something, it’s so hard to get anything made. If they say no, the odds are it will never get made. Once in a blue moon, you hear about the guy who passed on Star wars, but that’s incredibly rare.

Steve Cuden: Sure it is.

Greg Weissman: Yeah. It almost never comes back to bite you in the ass if you pass on something. But if you say yes to something and it doesn’t do well, you could be in big trouble.

Steve Cuden: Off with your head.

Greg Weissman: Right? And they learn to fear this. Despite the fact that they came there to make things. They quickly learned to be afraid to say yes to make anything.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Greg Weissman: and there are tons of exceptions. I’ve worked with a bunch of great executives who actively want to make things still, even though they’ve been in the business for quite some time. But the vast majority of them are afraid to say yes because they’re afraid of what might happen.

Steve Cuden: Well, and, especially people who are in the middle levels who have to give approval to something for someone above them to say yes to. They’re all afraid for all their jobs.

Greg Weissman: Right? So then you get a committee right now, it’s not about Michael Eisner at the top of the Walt Disney company saying, yes. Who’s got an answer to? Well, I guess the stockholders. But, you know, it’s not like they get to see eight shows and decide which one to pick. So he’s got, in essence, no one to answer to. And he’s got a bunch of talented people making shows. And, on some level, honestly, I show them eight shows. Every one of those eight is going to be worked on by a talented crew at Walt Disney television.

Steve Cuden: Of course, it is not saying all.

Greg Weissman: Things are equal, but they’re all going to be, at worst, solid.

Steve Cuden: Nobody’s hired at Disney in any capacity because they stink.

Greg Weissman: Right? Exactly. So there’s no repercussion for Michael if he happens to pick an idea that some junior executive like me at the time thinks, well, but this idea was better than that one. It’s still going to be good. You know, it may not be great. Maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong. You know, it doesn’t matter. The point is, he picked something. We went for it. We did the best job we could on it. And in point of fact, most of those shows were fucking great. Tailspin, dark winged duck, goof troop. I mean, they may not all be to any individual viewers particular tastes, but I think you could objectively look at them and go, wow, all things considered, given time constraints and budget constraints and man hours and all those considerations, that’s a great effing show. Right?

Steve Cuden: Well, that, period of time at Disney TV animation, it was bustling with incredible writers and producers.

Greg Weissman: It really was. So let’s say now you go forward two or three years, Michael’s not picking the shows anymore because he’s been pressured. Everyone keeps saying you micromanage everything. So one of the things he gives up, and this is true, is he gave up picking the animated shows even before he left Disney the last year or so he was there. He gave up being the guy who picked which show went and which show didn’t go. Right. But he doesn’t give that job to another individual. It becomes a committee decision. So there’s someone from marketing there. There’s something, someone from consumer products. There’s someone from the Disney Channel. There’s someone from Walt Disney tv animation. There’s someone from, buena Vista distribution. There are a dozen people making these decisions. Right? And that’s assuming you got to the point, you know, you got through enough gatekeepers to get to the committee.

Steve Cuden: Well, yeah, it’s a big deal. Just to get to that point, right?

Greg Weissman: So then you’re in this room with a bunch of people, and let’s say everyone loves this show. I mean, this pitch, you’re pitching the show, and they. And they’re loving it. One guy or galaxy, I mean, one human being in the room could say really easily, and I’ve seen this happen so many times, everyone else is going, yeah, this is great. I think this is going to be terrific. I don’t know. I don’t know. And then you can watch as support for this thing starts to bleed away all around the room. And this is the phenomenon, that I noticed happening in rooms like this, but also happening in focus tests. You get one strong opinion and it’s like wildfire around the table. And, the thing that’s literally always struck me as odd is that the person to the left and right of the person who’s like, I don’t know, or I don’t like it, or whatever, they get more insecure faster. And the last person who sort of gives in is actually the one sitting directly opposite, because the fire went around the table and so it doesn’t hit that person who’s directly opposite the naysayer. And I’ve seen this happen over and over again, and I don’t know why that is. You’d think the bandwagon jumping would happen all around the table at different points, but no, it literally circles the table in both directions, but it circles the table and hits the guy last who’s sitting directly opposite from the guy who first named.

Steve Cuden: Well, doubt is contagious, right?

Greg Weissman: I just didn’t realize it was contiguous.

Steve Cuden: Contiguous and contagious.

Greg Weissman: So the thing is, is that here’s what the person who likes the idea realizes in that moment. John Smith has just said, I don’t know. I don’t really. I don’t know if that’s going to work. I don’t really like. Now, if he goes forward, if he asserts his opinion that it was working, if we were all unanimously saying it was working great, then if it goes down in flames, well, we all liked it. You know, there’s no one person to blame, but as soon as one person says no, if the rest of them go forward, the guy who said no can, stand up later and said, I told him. I told him it wasn’t going to work, and he looks like a genius, and the rest of you look like idiots. And if it starts to really catch fire, which most of the time it does, if you’re the one holdout who says, no, I believe in this show. You are putting yourself on the line there. And again, I know a handful of executives who would be willing to do that, but the majority of them, learn fear.

Steve Cuden: The ones who will put themselves out usually have some form of clout or power or position. They’re not sometimes, although I’ve known junior.

Greg Weissman: Guy, I mean, I was a guy like that as an executive. And part of that came out of ignorance, you know, in other words. And, I know other execs who were like that too. But again, people on the younger side who, who hadn’t been in it long enough to be afraid and didn’t get the zeitgeist of the room or whatever. And so, yeah, sometimes it’s clout. Like, they feel they’ve got enough clout, they’ve earned their shot to say, no, I want to do this one. But sometimes it’s just, you know, belief and a lack of fear that comes with being young and stupid.

Steve Cuden: So you have just basically encapsulated in five minutes here exactly what the problem with all of Hollywood is. I think that it is, decisions made by committee. And I think that’s a really big problem for most of Hollywood. It used to be the old moguls in the old days, they all made their decisions by the seat of their pants. They didn’t have committees.

Greg Weissman: It’s a weird phenomenon, because on the one hand, we don’t want to go back to that because there was so much abuse.

Steve Cuden: Yes, there was.

Greg Weissman: And yet, and yet there’s something. This is the, the appeal of the authoritarian. It’s like, well, there was something to it, you know, that, again, back in the day, I did not appreciate, because all I could see were the shows he said no to. Right.

Steve Cuden: But at the end of the day, no one would remember that. But, you know, you and the three people in the room with you, and that’s it. And no one else would know that that show didn’t get on the air. You’d know so that the public wouldn’t know. Let’s talk about you and your creative process. You’ve written for numerous disciplines, mainly animation, comics and novels. And I’m wondering, do you have a preference in writing one over the other?

Greg Weissman: I don’t. They’re slightly, they’re all similar processes for me. Slightly different muscles get worked. But I have a, ah, for all three, this very high tech system involving, three by five index cards, sharpies, and bulletin boards and pushpins, and really hot whether I’m writing enough, yeah. You know, in fact, I’ve got my partner on young justice. He’s like, you know, they’ve got this program now that duplicates that. I’m like, it doesn’t work. He’s like, yes, it works. I’ve been using it. I’m like, it works for you, but it doesn’t work for me because I want to be able to see both the big picture on the bulletin board, you know, to be able to step back from it and get a sense of the thing as a whole. And I still want to be able to read what’s written on the cards and anything. Unless it’s like an incredibly short short story that you’re using on, one of these. And there are more than one programs that mimics the index card system. It’s like you’ve got two options. You can shrink it down so you can see the big picture, but then it shrunk down so much that with my old eyes, I can’t read it.

Steve Cuden: You can’t read it? Yeah.

Greg Weissman: or you bring it out far enough so that you can read the individual index cards on the screen, but then you can’t see the big picture at all. And so I am horrendously old school to the point that when I wrote the novels, which of course, you know, I wasn’t doing for Warner Brothers or Disney or Sony or something like that, I’m doing that at home. Right. It’s freelance.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Greg Weissman: I’m spreading index cards out on the floor of my office, and my office isn’t big enough for a novel, so it’s going into the living room, and we have pets, so I’ve got to close off the living room. And my wife, who strangely didn’t want to cork board all the walls in our house, I don’t know why, but she just wasn’t into that idea. Goes, okay, you can have those cards out covering, completely covering the floors of our living room in your office until. And she, you know, she’d say, on this date, we’re having people over, the cards have to be up by then.

Steve Cuden: Do you number the cards so you can keep them in order?

Greg Weissman: I don’t, because one of the things I do is I’m constantly rearranging, moving around.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Greg Weissman: So, but I do use, you know, those, I use clips, right. So, you know, when I have to pick up the cards because her parents are coming over or something like that, you know, I’m flipping them together. And then, you know, once her pairs have left for the night, I putting them all out again.

Steve Cuden: do you find it useful in the thinking process, in the creation process that you are actually writing it down by hand versus typing it out? I’m talking about the creation process now. Yeah.

Greg Weissman: My problem with typing it out, it’s not the difference between handwriting and typing. The problem for me is that like, I always edit on screen. Always. I don’t sit there with a, you know, a hard copy of the script and start, sure. Doing that and then transferring that, that just takes me, it just adds a step. I don’t need that. But that’s the problem when it comes to creating. In other words, I’m so used to editing on screen that I’m constantly making changes and then I lose stuff. Now, when I use the cards, if there’s something I decide not to use, I draw one line through it so you can still read it. But even though I know that exists on Screen, I can do that, you know, strike through kind of thing. But I forget to do that. I just delete it. You know, I’m just moving so quickly that I delete. I’m a pretty fast typist. Right. And so I deleted things before I remember that. Oh, I don’t want to delete anything because this happens all the time. Again, one of the main reasons, not the only, but main reasons that, one of many main reasons that I do use the index card method is that I don’t throw any index cards away. If I flat out misspell something, I might crumple that up and write the exact same thing down, only with the spelling correct or something, I suppose. But even that I rarely do because my spelling is not fantastic anyway. So, you keep it as something.

Steve Cuden: To refer back to if you need to.

Greg Weissman: Yeah. And I can’t tell you how many times, working on young justice, working on a comic book, whatever, I’m like, I mean, I’ll be sitting there with Brandon Vieti on young justice and we’re trying to crack a story, and I’ll be like, you know, we had this idea and we sort of rejected it. But I think here it didn’t work. Back there, I think here it might work. And I have this vague notion and he’s like, yeah, yeah, what was it? And I’m like, I don’t know. Now. That’s one of my, one of the things that, has evolved, because this whole process for me evolved over the years. And one of the reasons it evolved the way it has is that, when I was younger, I had a phenomenal memory for this kind of thing. I mean, phenomenal. So, like, for gargoyles going back 30 years nearly to, not nearly 30 years to when we were writing the show out of bulletin board index cards, but I would have one card per episode, and I would write two or three words on that card just to remind me. This is the episode where, you know, this happens. The pack return, something like that. Right. And I remember every single little detail in the episode. All I needed was a reminder. This episode came next. Here’s all the stuff that happened that was up here in my head. Right. Well, the problem with that is that I wasn’t trained to take notes because I didn’t ever need it to. I remembered it all so I’d start to get older, asked to get older, but it happened anyway. And that memory evaporates.

Steve Cuden: Yes, it does.

Greg Weissman: And I am not trained to take notes because I remember everything. Only now I don’t. So I’m now in the worst possible world. I haven’t written anything down, and I don’t remember anything either. So I had to literally retrain myself to write everything down. So, again, back in on gargoyles, an episode was one card on young justice, season four, which we finished the writing work on in 2020. Each episode was probably 300, 400 cards.

Steve Cuden: Wow, that’s a lot of detail for an animation episode.

Greg Weissman: Yeah, because neither Brandon nor I had a, memory that was worth a damn. But we had all these ideas, so we would write them all down, and like I said, a lot of them would get crossed out. We’re not doing that in this episode. Maybe we’ll save it for later. Maybe it’ll never get done. Maybe it was a dumb idea in the first place, but it’s still up there because you never know whether you’re going to need it down the road.

Steve Cuden: This card process you use for novels as well, as well as comic books and animation, same process, right?

Greg Weissman: It’s the exact same process. And the difference is the unit of measurement. The most basic is in a comic book, the unit of measurement is a. Is a page. A long time ago, I would literally break it down in my notes, panel by panel. I tend not to do that. I’m a little more flexible with myself. But I absolutely break it down page by page, because each page tells an individual story. Man on a cliffhanger. It may end on a moment of intrigue. It may add on a sad beat. It may end on all sorts of different things, but each page has to live and die on its own.

Steve Cuden: Is it the equivalent of a scene in a tv episode, sometimes.

Greg Weissman: Sometimes it’s only part of a scene, but each page still has to have a moment. It’s the equivalent of a commercial break. You’re making the, reader turn the page. Well, if they’re not intrigued, maybe they won’t turn that page. If they’re not interested, if they’re not involved. And that means that every page, every single page of a comic book, from my point of view, other writers may disagree, but from my point of view, every single page has rising and falling action. Every single page has a beginning, middle and end to it. even if it a sequence, you know, a scene between Goliath and Elisa might be three or four pages long, but every one of those four pages is telling its own story as part of the larger story. And then, you know, every sequence, every scene is part of the 20 to 28 page book, depending. And again, that page count is defined by the companies who are publishing, not by me. though I need to know that in advance.

Steve Cuden: Sure, of course, of course.

Greg Weissman: by the same token, you know, if I’m doing an animated episode, it’s 22 minutes long. Now, back in the day, pre streaming, we knew exactly how long the episode was. I mean, to the brain, you knew.

Steve Cuden: Exactly what the page counts were when you were going to hand it in. You know, all that.

Greg Weissman: So an episode of gargoyles was 19 minutes and 30 seconds exactly. Not 19 minutes and 29 and a half seconds. Not 19 minutes, 38 and a half seconds. It was 19 minutes and 30 seconds exactly. Add in the main title and the credits at the end and the total is 22 minutes total period. Boom. so the way I work is I start in the smallest unit of measurement and work my way outward. I try and keep in mind what’s the big picture. That’s why I like having it all visible to me. Because, I’m laying pipe for, later revelations. I’m planting seeds. I’m paying off things that we may have introduced four episodes earlier or something like that.

Steve Cuden: For the listeners who don’t know, laying pipe is setting things up and setting up your plot line as you’re going.

Greg Weissman: Right.

Steve Cuden: Because people might not know what we’re talking about.

Greg Weissman: Yeah. So, you know, it, you keep the big picture in mind. But I start with that smallest unit. And for me, in a comic book, that’s a page. In a novel, it’s a chapter in a, again, in the old world, in an animated episode, it’s an act. It’s, you know, between the commercial breaks. And when we moved into streaming, I still maintain teaser and three acts. Maintain that structure. It helped us from a production standpoint to still, break it down into a teaser and one, two, three acts.

Steve Cuden: Sure. Yeah, I bet it did.

Greg Weissman: But there’s no commercial break.

Steve Cuden: You didn’t actually have to put in hardware buttons on scenes, did you? Or did you?

Greg Weissman: Right. Well, we would do it at the end of every act. So one of the ways we decided on where the act was going to end is I didn’t want to. In a streaming episode, like in a regular episode, where there literally is a commercial break, you know, I might break, go to commercial, come back right where we left off, the exact same place, the exact same time in a streaming episode. I would never break an act there because why would you interrupt the middle of a scene when in fact, that scene is not going to be interrupted on, screen? Right. So I would break the act somewhere where the next stack starts. We’re in a different location, you know, or a different time. You know, if it’s 20 minutes later, it could be the same location or five years later or whatever, but where time and place had changed, there wasn’t the continuity through line, but it still helped us from a writing standpoint, and definitely from a production standpoint, to think in terms of a three act structure, because that’s the way our audience is still trained. That may change over time. You know, an audience that’s grown up on video games and things that are more ongoing, and don’t they grow up on streaming where there are no commercial breaks and that kind of thing, that may change, but our audience still right now is used to a three act structure, and it’s got a certain level of innate comprehension for them.

Steve Cuden: don’t you think audiences still want a setup and a resolution to a story?

Greg Weissman: I do. I do wonder how attenuated that will become over time when the structure of both movies, television shows, and everything else that consumers are using to get their stories. I wonder. I don’t know, but I wonder if that’s going to shift. They’ll still want payoffs. They’ll still want it. But I do wonder if the closed down nature of storytelling is going to alter. In other words, when we did gargoyles, for example, people talk about gargoyles being serialized, but it wasn’t really. It was episodic, but sequential. Not serialized, but sequential. The order you saw the episodes in mattered, at least to some degree. You got more out of it, I’ll say, at least if you watched them in order. But every episode was fairly self contained, except for we had a handful of multi parters, but each multi parter was at least self contained. Right.

Steve Cuden: Well, a, show like Goof Troop was truly episodic. Nothing was. You could put them in any order, it wouldn’t matter. But in gargoyles, there was a continuity to it of some sort.

Greg Weissman: Exactly. So we’ve moved past that, into a mode that is very familiar, for example, to viewers of soap operas, to something that’s truly serialized.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Greg Weissman: and that’s become more and more true on some of the shows I see on streaming services where I’m like, okay, this episode ended here fairly arbitrarily, because basically this show, this six episode season of Show X on, streaming service y is really just a six hour movie. You know, it’s not six episodes now. There’s still plenty of shows that each episode is contained. It’s part of a. The sequence, it’s still serialized. May end on a cliffhanger, but the episode has something about it that this is this story. But I’ve seen plenty of shows, and I’m not even saying this as a negative. I just am observing it and kind of fascinated by it, where I’m like, okay, there was really nothing about this episode that makes it an episode. It starts in the middle. It ends in the middle. This is like what I imagine I’m old, but not that old. a 1930s, you know, b cereal would be like, you know, where perils of Pauline or something like that. You know, where it’s fairly arbitrary where it begins and ends, and it’s all just about time. Well, we’ve gone an hour. That’s about right. Or 50 minutes. That’s about right. This is a good place to stop, you know? And that doesn’t mean that the series doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end. It just means each episode doesn’t necessarily have a beginning, middle, and end. It’s just going through. So I love this movie, Spider man. Okay, I’m getting the titles confused. So the first, it was into the spider verse, which was the first one. the second one just came out. The third one’s just been delayed indefinitely. And I love both of the first two. I love them, I really do. But one thing that I found fascinating about the second one is that structurally, it’s not a movie in the traditional sense. It’s three or four and a half episodes of a tv show done on a ridiculously high budget relative to television, of course.

Steve Cuden: Of course.

Greg Weissman: but you know, it basically begins with a Gwen episode, and then there’s a Miles episode, and then they all go to the new Bombay planet, or whatever it was called. And then they, go to the Spider headquarters, and then there’s sort of half an episode at the end, where Miles, you know, and Gwen are figuring out what’s going on, you know? And so it’s like, okay, that wasn’t structured like a movie. That was structured like four and a half episodes of a tv series. And it was great. I’m not knocking it. I’m just saying that that’s part of the changes I’m seeing, is that all our entertainment, all our storytelling, is being influenced by video games, by streaming, by this idea that things don’t have traditional beginnings, middle, and ends. And that was always, to me, growing up, the big difference between a movie and a tv show was that movies tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. And I remember to me, how shocking the Empire strikes back was when it didn’t end, rather ended on a cliffhanger. You know, it was like, you’re not allowed to do that. I mean, I literally. I remember coming into a drama class and going, well, you can’t do that. And people are going, well, why not? And I’m like, I had no. I didn’t have the words for it. And of course, I was wrong. Of course you couldn’t do it. It was, in fact, now, looking back, that’s my favorite of all, all the Star wars films ever.

Steve Cuden: And then mine, too. And you already alluded to how they did that, which is that Lucas himself was a huge fan of perils of Pauline, and so he would. He ended it on a cliffhanger, which is. Was perfectly intentional.

Greg Weissman: Right? And it’s brilliant. But that changed the paradigm. I mean, it’s easy to forget now when you’ve got the Marvel Cinematic universe and all these stuff where they. And on, if they. You know, sometimes the movies end, but then, you know, there’ll be a mid credit scene or an end credits scene, whatever.

Steve Cuden: Every time.

Greg Weissman: Every time we’re not done, you know, kind of thing. Well, that’s great. And I love that shit. But when Empire strikes back came out, you hadn’t seen anything like that for 30 years, right?

Steve Cuden: At least.

Greg Weissman: And it was revolutionary.

Steve Cuden: Except on tv, where shows would sometimes end on cliffhanger, tv was different.

Greg Weissman: Tv was a different animal. And that was the primary difference between movies and tv, other than budgets, you know, prestige difference was. Is it? And. Yeah, and prestige, the big difference in terms of structure was that tv was about telling ongoing stories. And it’s why, and I love movies, but it’s why, in terms of what I want to work on, tv was always more appealing to me, why comic books were appealing to me. Because I, if I started working on characters, I didn’t come to the end and go, okay, I’m done with these guys. Let me do something entirely different. Now. I want to tell more stories with gargoyles. That’s why I’m doing the gargoyles comics now. I want to tell more young justice stories. I want to, you know, I’ve written novels for other companies. and then they’re like, okay, great. We did these two. They’re great. We’re done. And I’m like, but I have more stories to tell. Yeah, we don’t need those. And I’m like, wait, wait. Because I fall in love with the characters I’m working with, inevitably, you know, the villains, the heroes, everything in between. And I want to keep going. That was never the nature again. When I was younger of, what movies were, movies were about telling one cohesive story. And, yeah, every once in a while, something was really popular, there’d be a sequel or something like that, nine times out of ten, and there are always exceptions, but nine times out of ten, you’d see the sequel that you were so excited for and go, oh, nowhere near as good. Yeah, no, I probably, could have been fine if they hadn’t made that.

Steve Cuden: But empire strikes back, godfather two, those are exceptions to the rule.

Greg Weissman: There are exceptions, but, but tv was designed to keep going. And then you come to the early eighties with shows on the comedy side, like cheers, and on the drama side, like Hill street blues. I mean, Hill street blues changed all of television forever.

Steve Cuden: Certainly did.

Greg Weissman: without Hill street blues, there’s no breaking bad, there’s no sopranos, there’s no. Aside from the fact that you can literally see the talent on Hill Street Milch and working under Botchko, and you can see them spread out. And then the people they work, who work for them, you can literally watch as a tree as it all branched out of, hill street.

Steve Cuden: Indeed.

Greg Weissman: But just creatively, the way Hill street television before that time and again, I’m sure there are exceptions, but fundamentally, television before that time had, one motto, which was status quo antebellum. Which is, no matter what changes characters go through during the course of the episode, by the end, you better pretty much put them back to where they were at the beginning. Sure, they’ve learned a lesson, but, you know, the situation has stayed stagnant. So four episodes later, if you need them to learn the same lesson, you can get away with it, because nothing seems to have changed. That was obviously true in sitcoms, but it was even true in dramas. And look, I’m all for episodic, purely episodic. You know, I love mysteries, detective stories. So, you know, I don’t need Perot or m Miss marple to learn something about their soul. I’m fine with them just solving the murder. Okay?

Steve Cuden: But that’s the joy.

Greg Weissman: I don’t want to live in Cabot Cove because people die there every week. But, But, you know, Jessica Fletcher, Greg, it.

Steve Cuden: Is called murder, she wrote.

Greg Weissman: Right, exactly. You know, so I don’t want to live there, but I’m happy to watch. Right. But Hill street changed all that. Now. Characters were evolving. They were changing. Situations were changing. A guy gets fired, he stays fired. Then he becomes a, you know, you might see him four episodes later working as an investigator for the lawyer who everyone thought was an asshole. And at the same time, you’re like, well, that’s the only job I could get, you know?

Steve Cuden: And things did not end neatly right.

Greg Weissman: And they did not end neatly at all. And in fact, the first season is completely serialized. you get to the second season, and the network said, give us at least one story in each episode that has a beginning and middle and end in the episode. Right. And that helped. It did. It helped make the show more popular because people could watch the story, and there was at least one story with the beginning, middle, and end. But they were still doing all this multi tier storytelling, all the stuff that every other show now is their bread and butter. And not just high prestige dramas, but genre stuff and everything. It all emerges out of Hill street blues. But even a show like cheers, the relationship between Sam and Diane was an ever evolving, ongoing thing. If you take the first five seasons of Cheers, it’s different after Diane leaves. Kirsty Alley version of Cheers is very funny, and it still evolves. The situation evolves, but it doesn’t have the cohesion that the first five seasons had.

Steve Cuden: Well, they. Well, they lost. They lost the romantic tension, right?

Greg Weissman: So that showed it on the comedy side and Hill street on the drama side. Hill street came first by a year. So. And I still feel like Hill street doesn’t exist. Cheers doesn’t exist in the same form that, you know, the relationship between Frank Perillo and Joyce Davenport on Hill street blues has a real effect on Sam and Diane. I could be dead wrong about that, but I feel that Hill street also.

Steve Cuden: Was the first really big show to take and service an ensemble of characters. And you may not necessarily saw every one of them every week, and it was this huge cast and it would go off in all these various tentacles. That was also very unusual.

Greg Weissman: It was. And now that happens all the time.

Steve Cuden: All the time. Let’s chat for a moment about your novel writing, which I find fascinating. tell the listeners what rain of the ghosts and, spirits, of ash and foam, are about.

Greg Weissman: Spirits is a sequel to rain. Rain, is a 13 year old girl who lives on a caribbean island where the primary industry is tourism. And her parents run a bed and breakfast and they live there. So this is a girl who’s grown up living in a house and working there, in a house where there are always strangers living in the bedroom next door. and she feels trapped, as the book begins, she just feels trapped. She feels like she’ll grow up, she’ll graduate high school. she already works for her dad on his charter boat, and she works for her mom in the, in the bed and breakfast, and she feels like she will. This, is a fictional set of islands, but they’re based on Taino mythology, which I researched in depth. And so it’s this chain of eight islands, and she feels like she’s going to spend her whole life servicing tourists on these eight islands, and that’s just going to be her life. And she feels this way at 13, and she just feels really trapped. And then what happens is this isn’t a big spoiler because it happens so early in the book, is that her grandfather passes away. And indirectly this leads to an introduction to this sort of mystic, magical world sort of just under the surface of life on these islands, again, based on the, mythology of the teno. And, she realizes that there’s something bigger in her life. and she’s got a mission, she’s got a, purpose, and it’s bigger than just helping tourists out. And that discovery proceeds through the. Through both books. I’m tremendously proud of these books. I won’t pretend they sold well. I wish they had. I’m a New York Times bestselling author, but not with those two books.

Steve Cuden: These were whole cloth, your creation, right?

Greg Weissman: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And did they. Did I read somewhere that they came from you having pitched it as a series first?

Greg Weissman: Yeah, I pitched it at Dreamworks. I was working on staff at Dreamworks and pitched it as a series, sold it to Nickelodeon, and then it’s complicated, but, it didn’t end up going. And when I left DreamWorks, I’d worked for Jeffrey Katzenberg for ten years, seven years at Disney and three years at DreamWorks. So I worked for Jeffrey for ten years. And I’m not saying we were best buddies or anything, but we got along. And I knew, I felt I had one chip to cash in after a decade of service. So I went to him and I said, look, you’re not doing anything with this show idea. You guys own it, but you’re not doing anything with it. I want to turn it into a series of novels. Can I buy it back from you? And Jeffrey was, wonderful. Sold it to me for a dollar.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Greg Weissman: now some of your listeners may go, he made you. How petty is that, making you pay a dollar? But that’s not the idea. Oh, no, it’s great to pay something. It’s great because it’s a company and they need to see that the asset. So that was as cool as he could possibly be within a corporate company.

Steve Cuden: They clearly had spent some money on it.

Greg Weissman: Oh, yeah. I mean, thousands of dollars, not fortune, but, you know, we had done an animation test and we had done,

Steve Cuden: A lot, a lot more than a dog.

Greg Weissman: I wrote a pilot, and, so money was spent. but he sold it to me for a dollar, and I wrote the first book and sent it off to a bunch of publishers and got a bunch of very polite rejection letters. So I handed it to, some people I trusted to say, look, it’s, it’s not selling. I don’t know. I really feel good about it, but it’s not selling. What do you think? And I got a bunch of feedback back from, again, people whose opinions in general I value, but most of it didn’t work for me. Their suggestions, it was like they’re going, this is really cool, but what if you did this? And I’m like, okay, but that’s a different story. You know? In other words, it’s not that it’s bad. It’s just, that’s not the story I want to tell. Help me fix this story. Don’t tell me to tell a different story. A lot of people, a number of people, there weren’t a lot of people who saw it, but a handful of people among them said, change the narrator. And I’m like, I don’t want to change the narrator. I like the narrator. So I gave it to one guy, a tremendous writer named Sam, Bernstein. And he said, you know, I can tell something’s going on in this first novel, behind the scenes scenes, there’s a, there’s clearly some force, but you don’t ever go into who that is. And I’m like, you know, it’s that v eight moment. Like, oh my God. Duh. Because, you know, I’d written it like a tv series because all my experience was in tv, and in a tv series, I don’t want to reveal that there’s a someone behind it for till episode, you know, five or six. Right. You know? Right. but it’s a novel. Even in Sorcerer’s Stone, Voldemort appears by the end. Right? Sure. And I’m like, yeah, I’ve got to put my big bad in this book. And so that note, and that’s the key thing. I mean, one of the things is that you’ve got to take responsibility, particularly if it’s something that you own for your own work. People are going to give you feedback and it might be good or not, but if it doesn’t work for you, you just shouldn’t take it. even if they’re right, you know, if it makes you feel like it’s not yours anymore, then you shouldn’t take it. But here was a note where I’m like, yes, that’s what’s missing from it. So I started a rewrite from page one, putting minor, changes throughout to get to my Voldemort equivalent character, right. And then I got to the chapter that I really was going to have to completely rewrite to introduce this game character. And it was a little intimidating. So I said, okay, let me just put it aside for a week, get it straight in my head what I’m doing here, and then I’ll come back and rewrite it. So ten years later, it had been sitting on that shelf for a decade. And I got laid off from season, two of young justice. I mean, we were done with it. So I was out of work and I went and said, you know, I never did finish that. I knew what I wanted to do, but I just got, I mean, I got busy for sure, but the main thing was, is I just got intimidated. So I said, let me go back to that. And I picked it up and, you know, I hadn’t even looked at the thing for nearly a decade. So I started from scratch. A, rewrite from scratch. And the whole rewrite took me three weeks. I mean, I waited ten years for something that I could have done in a month, right? There’s got to be a lesson in that. I’m not quite sure what it is, but there’s got to be one, right?

Steve Cuden: Well, some, sometimes things just take a while to perk, that’s all.

Greg Weissman: I don’t even think it was that. I just think I got scared. I really do just think I got scared and was thinking, maybe I’m not up to this. Maybe novel writing isn’t my thing. and whatever. But, you know, ultimately, you know, I went through the first chunk of the book, making little, tiny, minor changes. I’m a better writer, I like to think, than I was a decade earlier, right? So I’m plussing the prose and all this sort of stuff, and then I get to that same chapter that was like a wall to me before, and I just rewrite it. And it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t that hard. And then, so I was finished and I sent the book to a publisher, and two or three weeks passed and I didn’t hear anything. And I thought, oh, man, maybe he hates it. Because usually by now I’d have gotten a rejection letter by then. And instead I got a phone call and he’s like, yeah, we want to buy it. We want to buy the second book in the series. Because I had sent the book and I said a very brief proposal outlying the books that in the series, that would follow because it was a nine book series. So it was like a paragraph per each of the next eight novels. And so they bought the first two books. The first one was written and the second one, all I had was a paragraph. But he bought the first two books just like that.

Steve Cuden: Nothing daunting about having a paragraph and knowing you have to write a whole novel from it, right? So I’ve been having the most marvelous conversation with, Greg Weissman, all about writing and animation and novels and comic books and fantastic stuff. We’re going to wind the show down a little bit right now, and I’m m just wondering, in all of your vast experiences, are you able to share with us a story in which something weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or maybe just plain funny happened?

Greg Weissman: Probably. I worked with, Steven Spielberg at DreamWorks when Dreamworks, television animation, first started up. This is around, I’m going to say, from like 96 to 98. And, I remember, when we first started up, he was directing Jurassic park two, and he’d already done all the shooting in Hawaii. And so he was on the universal lot, so we could go meet with him periodically, you know, during his lunch break. He was, you know, working director, very busy. But they take an hour for lunch, and we could go meet with him on the universal lot. But then he finished that movie, and I don’t blame him. He was tired, so he went to his, he had a home, at least then he did on Long island. And so, you know, it’s summer in Los Angeles, summer in Long island, and I’m in this, you know, hot office in Encino where the air conditioning is not working, and he’s by his pool in Long island. And we’re talking about a show that eventually became a show called Invasion America that I didn’t end up working on. but at the time, I was supposed to be one of the, showrunners on it. And, so we’re talking about that. And, I just, it felt surreal, right? You know, it’s just like I’m talking to Steven fucking Spielberg, and he’s lying by his pool. And I don’t know if this is true, but I pictured him with a mojito, and, it was incredible. But then when the summer ended, we’re like, okay, so he’s going to. It was very difficult to reach him because he wasn’t in town and he wasn’t working. And at first, he was sort of like, yeah, yeah, you know, I’m going to be in New York, but I’ll be available to you guys. In fact, I’ll be more available because I’m not working. But in fact, he became less available because as the summer progressed, after the first, you know, few weeks or so, it, became clear that he kind of wanted to be on vacation. And so it became very difficult to reach him. But we were like, okay, but he’s going to be making a new movie. But then the movie he was making was amistock, which he was shooting in the Caribbean and in New England, which meant we couldn’t just, you know, drive across to studios.

Steve Cuden: That would be hard, right?

Greg Weissman: So, and then we’re like, okay, so when he’s done with that, then we’ll have more access to him. And then he started, making saving private Ryan, which he was making, shooting in Europe. And so, okay, that’s even further away. And then they announced, and this didn’t end up happening, but they announced that his next movie was going to be, memoirs of a geisha. And we’re like, is he trying to get as far away from us as possible? but he was our boss, you know, so it was tough. We were trying to do the shows he wanted to do and do them in the way he wanted to do, but we, But he was. I mean, it’s a cliche, but he was the busiest man in show business.

Steve Cuden: You had a vision of him sitting there with a mojito, and I had a vision of him never not working.

Greg Weissman: yeah, the mojito bit was, brief. He was working otherwise. but it was just one movie after another, and they just kept getting further and further away from Los Angeles, certainly from our offices, which were the first temporary offices in NCAA, where we moved to that sort of lovely Glendale campus that Dreamworks has, or at least had. Do they still have that?

Steve Cuden: I don’t know whether there’s. Are they still producing animation?

Greg Weissman: Oh, yeah, they are, but they’re in different location now in Glendale. I wonder who’s got that. Maybe features is still there. I honestly don’t know.

Steve Cuden: Sorry. Well, that was, you know, you got your interaction with the man himself, so I think that’s pretty cool. Last, ah, question for you today, Greg. you’ve given us just a huge amount of really great advice to chew on throughout this whole show. But I’m wondering, do you have a solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give to those who are maybe starting out in the business, or perhaps they’re in a little bit and trying to get to the next level?

Greg Weissman: I have these sort of standard, what I call my starter pack of writing tips, sort of at the most basic. There are basically four. One is to write every day something. I don’t care if you’re writing a page, 20 pages. I don’t care if you’re writing a shopping list. I have a, you know, the black and white comp books that, you know, some days it’s just lists of ideas. Some days it’s my thoughts on an episode of something that I watched or whatever. I don’t really use it as a diary, although there were years when I tried to do that, and it just wasn’t me, and I don’t do that. But I think the trick to it is, is that you’ve got to write every day, and you’ve got to be disciplined about it. You can’t skip a day. Because I’m without a doubt prone to procrastination, as indicated by my 1010 years in between my first and second drafts of my novel.

Steve Cuden: Imagine that, a writer who procrastinates. How would that ever happen?

Greg Weissman: So you absolutely have to learn the discipline of writing on a daily basis, whatever that means to you. I don’t need to define it, but you need to be able to sit down and, in a disciplined way, write something every day, make a little bit of progress on this project or that project. I don’t care if you’re laser focused on one thing or if you’re like a butterfly flitting around from thing to thing. I don’t care. But, right, every single day, because it’s just too easy to sort of go, oh, God, I’m so tired. I’m just going to skip it today, and then, you know, there’ll be some other reason to skip it tomorrow and the day after, and pretty soon. It’s been ten years and you haven’t looked at your novel, or when I was at Disney, had been five years, and I hadn’t done any writing on my own. I just, you know, been a development executive for five years. So that’s one. The second thing is read, read everything you can get your hands on. I’m partial to detective fiction. I write a lot of fantasy in Sci-Fi I don’t read a lot of fantasy and Sci-Fi but I do read newspapers. I read the newspaper every day. Every day. I read a lot of classic literature. I try now to expand that beyond just western culture, the quote unquote, you know, tent poles of western culture, because there’s a lot of brilliant stuff that was written over the centuries and millennia in other cultures, and it’s a little harder to find, but it isn’t that hard to find. So just read, read, ready? Read. Absorb that stuff. Make that part of your consciousness. The third thing is proofread. It is amazing to me how many young writers show up trying to pretend that they’re professionals and they don’t know how to proofread. What that tells me as a producer or as an executive or as anyone who’s evaluating someone else’s work is that, oh, you don’t care enough to police your stuff. If you don’t care enough about your stuff, why should I care about it? So, you know, typos happen. If I read something and I see a typo, that’s fine, I move on. Then if I see a second one, I might get a little annoyed. If I see a third typo, I’m probably throwing that thing in the trash, honestly. Because again, if you don’t care enough, why should I? to me, it’s a sort of three strikes rule. But I am not kidding. I know people who, if they see one typo, it’s in the trash. And proofreading is an incredibly useful skill. And I say, and keep in mind, I’m dyslexic, so I had to learn coping strategies to make up to compensate for my dyslexia. So one thing that I do to proofread is I read aloud because my ear will catch things that my eye will not. If it’s truly important, I give it to my wife to read, not again for, like, creative feedback, but just literally, to proofread, you know, did I skip that period? Did I misspell this word? You can’t count on spell check. I taught, freshman English at USC when I went to graduate school. And the first assignment that we gave out was, what do you hope to gain from your college education? And I got out of my class of two sections, right? So I had about 40 freshmen total. I got at least eight papers that, explained to me what they hoped to get out of their collage. They misspelled college as collage. Again, I’m dyslexic. I’m sympathetic to that. And they use spell check, but collage is a real word.

Steve Cuden: Yeah, well, spell check won’t catch it.

Greg Weissman: So spell check won’t help you with that.

Steve Cuden: No.

Greg Weissman: They’re turning in papers. We’re right in the title, big as life across the top. They’re saying what they want out of their collage education, and I’m thinking paper mache. What kind of collage are you talking about? But they just got it wrong, you know? And aside from that being, you know, vaguely embarrassing, or at least it should be, it shows me they’re not putting enough care into their work. All, right, well, I’m a teacher. That’s my job. Teach them how to care. But if I’m an executive or if I’m a producer, that part isn’t my job.

Steve Cuden: What kind of a massage were you trying to get, exactly?

Greg Weissman: and then the fourth piece of advice is part of my starter pack that I used to have. And it’s tougher now to say this since the pandemic, literally. But I say, you’ve got to move to where the work is. I had a conversation once with a guy at a convention, group of people, a fan, who came up to me and said, I really want to do what you do. And I’m like, great. He’s like, so what do you advise? And I’m like, well, where do you live? He’s like, seattle. I’m like, okay, when are you moving to Los Angeles? And he’s like, not moving to Los Angeles. I live in Seattle. I said, oh, so you don’t really want to do what I do. And he’s like, no, no, I really want to do what I do. I said, oh, you do? Okay, when are you moving to Los Angeles? And he looked at me like I was nuts. And he’s going, I’m not. I live in Seattle. I’m like, oh, I get it. I get it. So you don’t really want to do what I do. And obviously I knew what was happening, but I wanted to see how long this would go on before he figured it out, you know? And it didn’t end. I just kept reiterating the same two points. This is pre pandemic. And back then, certainly, if you were a new writer, and I still kind of think this is true, not as true, but still largely true, that if you’re new, once you’re established, I do believe as a writer, you can live anywhere. But if you’re new, you’ve got to be where the work is. You’ve got to be networking. You’ve got to be meeting people. You’ve got to be able to go in and take meetings, going in and pitch premises or springboards. You know, you gotta be where the work is. If you live 100 miles away, I guess you can get in your truck and drive into town and be there first thing in the morning and commute. If you want to do that, that’s on you. Fine, whatever. But you gotta be close enough to be where the work is. I knew writers who didn’t want to live in LA. Kerry Bates, lived in, Berkeley, California, up north. Another I knew lived in New Jersey. And if they had, you know, they tried to group their meetings together, but they would fly in, and it’s at their expense, but they felt it was worth it because the money they made doing that writing covered that occasional commute, but it still made it hard on them to get regular work.

Steve Cuden: But they had to be established.

Greg Weissman: Yeah. And Kerry and Peter, these two guys I’m thinking of specifically, they were already established by that time. If you’re new, it’s really tough. If you’re not around. Now, I’ll admit pandemic has changed that to some degree, because the people you’d be meeting with are everywhere and nowhere. And a lot of the meetings are on Zoom now or on teams or whatever, you know. So maybe it’s changed, but I tend to suspect. I mean, just, Warner Brothers is now insisting that people come in at least three days a week. They’re recognizing that no one wants to come in five days a week, but they’re now insisting that people come in three. And, you know, I thought during the pandemic that maybe the whole idea of an office was changing, but, and it has some, and it hasn’t some. And I still have this sense that if you’re new, it’s gotta be really hard to break in. If you’re not where work is. And there’s work different places. There’s work in New York, for sure. There’s definitely work in LA. There’s. If you’re canadian, that’s a great boon. you can. There’s work in Toronto, there’s work in, British Columbia, and they’re constantly looking for canadian content, quote unquote canadian content. And it helps to actually be canadian as a writer. Yes, it does get work. There’s a lot of possibilities. There’s work in Houston. Not a lot, but some, but getting jobs, if you want to do this professionally, like, if you just want to do it as a hobby, and then every once in a while, you score an actual paid gig, great, do what you want, you know, but you’re not depending on it for your living.

Steve Cuden: But even that is extraordinarily difficult to do unless you’re well established, because nobody knows who you are otherwise.

Greg Weissman: Exactly. And. But the only difference is, if you’re not depending on it, use it to pay the mortgage or buy food or raise your kids or whatever, then more power to you. Go for it. Whatever works. Works again. There are always exceptions. There’s the person who, you know, takes their twilight fan fiction, turns it into a risque series, with gray in the title, and becomes a billionaire, you know? I mean, exceptions exist, but for most of us, it’s about playing the percentages. And the percentages, to me, sort of dictate, you got to be somewhere where there’s work where you can meet people, where you can meet with people, where you can network, where you can go to union meetings, where you can do the kinds of things that will help you get the work down the road. And that’s really hard to do if you’re living in a town where none of the work is done, no question. So those are my four big things. Three of them still apply. Write, read, proofread. The fourth one, go to where the work is, is a little mushier, because the pandemic has changed the world a bit. But I’m, guessing it’s probably still true. Well, I’m m just less confident about.

Steve Cuden: It, I think that those are four very valuable pieces of advice, and they’re pieces of advice I give to people myself, including students that I’ve had over the years in classes in the school where I taught. And, yeah, you’ve got to do those things. You’ve certainly got to write and read. There’s no question about it. And without doing that, it’s very hard to become a professional writer. That’s for darn sure. And then being where the work is is very helpful, especially in Hollywood. You want to be a novelist, you can live almost anywhere. You want to be a screenwriter, you almost have to be in LA or New York, but mostly LA.

Greg Weissman: Yeah. Ah, again, once you’ve established yourself. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Then you can go. Sure, of course.

Greg Weissman: But, if you’re new. I was going to say young. Young doesn’t really matter if you’re new. That’s what matters. If you don’t have a rep already, if you don’t have credits, if you don’t have a IMDb page yet, or you do. But it’s tiny, you know, that’s what I’m talking about. Once you’re established, all bets are off. But, even then, it’s easier if you’re in town. It’s just less necessary.

Steve Cuden: Well, Greg Wiseman, this has been just, an incredible hour, fun StoryBeat today, and I really am very pleased that you have shared all this wonderful information with us. And I can’t thank you enough for, spending your time, your wisdom, on the show and for our listeners.

Greg Weissman: Thank you. It’s been fun.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great support. Welcome to StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, Tunein, and many others. Until next time, im Steve Cueden and may all your stories be unforgettable.