Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Hal Ackerman: Well, the best I can say is create inventory. Don’t think that the first thing that you do is precious. You know, don’t harbor the illusion that that is going to be the thing that is going to be, uh, that’s going to send you into the stratosphere. Don’t try to second guess trends. And, uh, I think the really important thing is don’t doubt your own life.

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. Well, I’m so very happy that my guest today, Hal Ackerman, is making his second appearance on StoryBeat. Hal spent 30 years teaching screenwriting in UCLA’s legendary screenwriting program. Along with Richard Walter and Lou Hunter, Hal helped launch the careers of many dozens of writers whose work you’ve seen on screens large and small. Hal has sold film and television material to all the outlets. His screenplay Holyer’s Bridge holds the unofficial Guinness record for having been continuously optioned for 20 consecutive years, owned during that stretch by two Academy Award winning producers, two Tony Award winning producers and others. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals. Sweet Day was recorded by the late Robert Forster. Concrete Charlie and the golden boy won the 2020 sports literate sports short contest. Hal’s written three soft boiled murder mystery novels about an aging counterculture PI named Harry Stein. The first of those, Stein Stung, won a Lovey award for best first Novel. Subsequently, Hal published Stein Stoned and more recently Smoke and Lather. I thoroughly enjoyed reading all three Stein books and can tell you Hal delivers a unique take on the detective genre. Funny while being dramatic, Hal’s writing is cleverly brilliant and brilliantly clever. I highly recommend all three Harry Stein books to you. How’s also known for publishing the highly informative and truly useful book Write Screenplays that Sell the Ackerman Way. If you want insight from one of the foremost screenwriting teachers of the last half century, make a point to check it out. How’s One Man Play Testosterone? How Prostate Cancer Made a Man of Me Renamed Prick, won the William Saroan Award for Drama and was named Best play at the 2012 New York solo Festival. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m proud to say I was fortunate to have been one of Hale’s many students while I was attending UCLA’s graduate screenwriting program. Once again, it’s a true joy for me to have the great Hal Ackerman as my guest on StoryBeat today. Hal, welcome back to the show.

Hal Ackerman: What a great introduction. Thank you. I’d love to meet this guy.

Steve Cuden: Well, I’ll have to introduce you sometime, so let’s go back, uh, just a little tiny way. I know you retired from teaching a few years ago, and I’m wondering if you have found that the extra time that you now have to be creative, liberating, or do you in any way miss the grind of teaching?

Hal Ackerman: Uh, both are true. Of, uh, course there’s more time available because I really did try to work as hard as I could to further the goals and, um, creative processes of all the students I had. I took that quite seriously. You rightfully proud of the successes you included among folks. I was able to write while I was doing it as well. But it’s not only the time, but, um, keeping all of the students work in my head. And I was about to start a new project. Uh, at the time it was new. Now it’s about nine years old and I finally have fail finish that, I hope a novel that I was working on that was far. It was very, very different from anything I’d ever written before. And, uh, I thought, and maybe still think it was far beyond my capabilities. It took a lot of research. It was. It was a historical piece. And I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to do both that novel and keep everything going on in my head and the students work in my head. And I didn’t want to give short shrift to either. I had taught. It was a nice round number, 30 years, and I thought, okay, you know, time to leave. But unencumbered by that. Um, yes, it does free up a lot of time and mental bandwidth. But I do miss it. I do miss it. Um, I’ve done some lectures and some guest speakerhips and, um, I do some private consultations. Uh, it’s really exciting to work with talented people. Uh, so, yes, I do still miss it. I do.

Steve Cuden: Well, you get a little touch of it by being a consultant, and you get a little touch of it by doing lectures and so on. But it’s not the same as being in the class classroom, is it?

Hal Ackerman: It is not the same. And I’ll tell you, after I retired from UCLA and, uh, M moved to New York, which is, um, where I’m from, uh, I did do A couple of stints. I taught for a year at NYU and at Brooklyn College and at graduate schools.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that your years of teaching has influenced the way that you write? Do you write differently because of your teaching?

Hal Ackerman: I think so. I never was taught screenwriting. I, uh, was a playwright. And, um, I had a very uncomfortable experience as a writer, as a playwright with a play that I had written that, um, I don’t know what to go into. But a, uh, director and producer, m that became attached to it, suddenly wanted to grab writing credit as well. Anyway, it was a bad scene, and so I decided I had to come to a place with more integrity. So I came to Los Angeles.

Steve Cuden: Oh, yeah, A lot more integrity there.

Hal Ackerman: Exactly. But I knew nothing at all about screenwriting, about movies that, you know, I went to the movies as, uh, a just as a normal, regular person on Saturday night sometimes. How.

Steve Cuden: I’m sorry, you’ve never been a normal, regular person?

Hal Ackerman: No, I said like one. So when I u. When I came here, you know, all I brought with me, you know, uh, as credentials were my New York arrogance. Uh, you know, I. If I could write a play, which was hard, how hard could it be to write a movie? You know, couldn’t John McAlero learn to play ping pong? You know, that was my New York arrogance. Well, um, as Sanosawski said, when you think you know everything, prepare to have, uh, the next phase of your education. The first screenplay I wrote or thought there was a screenplay. I remember I gave it short it to some agent or producer or something. And they said, well, you know, this is really good dialogue. And I wasn’t surprised to hear that. That was always my strength as a playwright. But the guy said, I can’t see where your first act ends. And I just thought I was getting razzed. Um, you know, I knew movies didn’t have acts because, you know, you go to the theater, you know, when an act comes, the curtain comes down, the lights come up and you go out and have a cigarette. And that doesn’t happen in the movie. So, yeah, he was like. It was an elbowing to the ribs of the new guy. Har ha.

So, you know, again, who was the joke on? It was the joke on, you know, the joke from New York. So I sent out to try to learn what that meant. And, uh, I went to the movies. It was in the early 70s. You could still go to an afternoon show for like a, you know, a buck 50 or something like that, and had a little pen, like with me, and I Started writing down every event that took place and started after a while to see, oh yeah, there is an act here. This here is something like a real gate post, something that actually happens. So I learned that structure, uh, when I started teaching, that was the structure that I taught. You know, I think everyone has their own ideas about what structure is, but I think it was from consciously trying to teach myself what it was that I wanted to learn, that I was thenable to teach to students. And it taught me a great deal because now I’m working with students and I’m able to see the same thing that those people saw in my stuff. Uh, you know, where things were going wrong, where the structure failed. And I think that, uh, even now when I’m writing a novel, it somehow falls into a three act structure, um, unconsciously. So I think that both really worked consciously and unconsciously and subconsciously. The teaching, the writing itself, because it’s all the same thing really. You write something new and you’re teaching yourself how to write it.

Steve Cuden: That’s true. You’re always teaching yourself something new and the way you’re doing it. So let me ask you, what do you think is structure? Because I go off of a fellow or your colleague in the school, Howard Suber, I go off of his definition of structure, it’s not just Aristotle and three acts or beginning, middle and end, but off of his definition of structure as well, which is, it’s the relationship of the pieces and parts to each other and to the whole and that you have to have everything unified and sort of working as one meshed set of gears. How do you think of structure?

Hal Ackerman: Well, I do think of it in terms of acts. And when I start to engage a story as events, you know, as I start to just sort of gather up, um, the things that are happening, I am not, um, absolutely scrutinizing, but looking for those key points. Uh, it’s like if I’m planning to drive across country, let’s just say I know what my capacity is to, you know, a number of hours, I know how long the trip is, and I want to sort of plan out places where I’m going to stop and sleep for the night.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Hal Ackerman: And I guess so I’m sort of structuring the trip and then once I decide how far I can go and I look to see what’s there, say, okay, that’s going to be my end of my first act, then, uh, you know, it’s not just the distance between New York and Indianapolis or, you know, whatever that might be, but uh, you know, why am I taking this trip? Is it to get there as fast as I can? Is it to see all the things along the way? Is it to meet some particular people? And in a kind of way, those are the same questions you’re asking when you, when you’re writing a script. Um, you know, I know that, know I’ve come to, to a definition of what the end of a first act is and roughly where it takes place. To me, you know, it’s where the bridge washes out and you can never go back to where you were in the first place. It’s like a point of no return. And it generally in movies happens around, you know, 30 minute, 30 page, 30 page mark. So as I’m planning out my structure for the film, you know, I’m looking ahead and thinking, okay, you know, what is going toa be the moment when Michael Corleone, you know, shoots and kills those people, you know, in the restaurant? You know, what, that, uh, you know, that’s his point of no return. I’ve come to see the end of Act 2 as the worst thing that can possibly happen to the character short of death. So when I look ahead, uh, you know, in the movie I’m trying to write, you know, it’s like, okay, you know, what’s the worst thing that happens to Juno? And that would be Juno. Well, the people that she was going to have adopt her baby, break up, you know, okay, so now I can lay that ahead of me and play toward that. Just like if you’re driving someplace, you could say, okay, I got to make it to Reno by Thursday. Uh, what am I going to see along the way? How fast do I have to go? What can I skip? Where can I dwell for a while? And it’s the same thing within structure. There are certain scenes that you have to really compress and allow the event just as simply takes place so that you give breathing time to scenes that have a lot of nuance and change and, you know, things in it that take the time and the need the time. But you can’t do that to every scene, otherwise you’ll have a 7,000 page movie. Uh, but, you know, so you have to learn what goes in and what doesn’t go in, what can be implied and inferred and what needs to, you know, grow in front of that the audience has to really participate in. So to me, those are all, all the aspects of structure and you need.

Steve Cuden: All of them to work in concert or some, or it won’t work as a whole.

Hal Ackerman: Well, that’s true of anything. It’s true of your body, it’s true of a car. Yeah. Um, and it’s absolutely true, um, of a movie. You know, writers, I think, make themselves very aware of, I mean, certainly writers that come through our classes who make them very aware. And you know, that structure, it’s a flexible, fluid thing. People can feel it in different ways as long as they’ve, you know, an Oldsmobile and a Studebaker, you know, are different, but they each run in their own way. And different movies will have their own sense of structure, their own sense of pace. Uh, but however different they all are and they can be, they all, as you say, they all have to have an internal integrity u that creates a whole experience. And that, I think, is very much what a writer thinks about. And it’s not always the thing that people think about. Once the script is written and gets out into the production world, you know, sometimes those important factors. Well, you. Not every movie feels like a really well told story.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s right. You alluded earlier to your first script that the person that read it said your first act doesn’t end. Where’s the end of your first act? Uh, so you needed to actually have that understanding of where it sort of breaks into a different place. And that’s part of structure.

Hal Ackerman: That is absolutely part of structure. And there are many very specific structural parts. Just, I mean, like you and I and most other human beings, we are all actually structured to the same geometric ratios. From our head to our chin is like 1/7 of us, and from, and our torso is 4/7th and from knees to, you know, it all adds up to seven parts. I think Michelangelo is one to figure that out. Or maybe it was Leonardo. And even though every one of us fits that very same geometry, every one of us is also individual and completely distinguishable from the other. And the same thing, I think can be true about movie scripts, even though they may follow that geometric form, let’s just say roughly 30 pages to the first act, roughly to page 75 to the second act, to 110, the third act. Even if every single movie had that exact same geometry, they could still be completely and absolutely different, 100% true because of what’s inside them. Between you and me and everybody else is different. Uh, you know, our faces are different, our aspects different, the things we care about are different. Uh, the way in which we will respond to the exact same situations may be different. And that needs to be and can be and is true in the best of films, I think.

Steve Cuden: That’s the difference for me between what we call form and format.

Hal Ackerman: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And so there is a form to it, but not a format to it.

Hal Ackerman: Yes.

Steve Cuden: So the format is repeatable, but the form, the form is not actually repeatable. It’s just the general things that we understand in communicating to one another. This is the form that a story takes. And without that form, people don’t understand what we’re saying or they don’t understand the story. So you need it.

Hal Ackerman: Yes. And the story itself doesn’t understand itself. I mean, it doesn’t deliver with the thing that a story needs to deliver, which is involvement and empathy and um, all of those wonderful things that uh, from early times, um, on.

Steve Cuden: Well, novels can go off in many directions and you can have many sidebars and, and things that can go forwards and backwards quite easily. But in a movie there’s a tendency toward it needing to be much more concise, much tighter because it can’t be sprawling, it can’t go on for a thousand pages. It has to have a certain time to it or people are going to leave. So there is that difference in the form of a, um, movie versus a novel. And you’ve done both quite well. And so my question to you is, do you have a preference when you’re thinking about story? I know that you’re now writing more prose and that’s become your thing at the moment, but do you miss writing screenplays? Do you think about writing screenplays at all?

Hal Ackerman: Yes, I do. Um, I actually have. I actually wrote one, uh, last year that I like quite a lot. I’ve tried, you know, sending it around, uh, and I’m still doing. So it’s a wonderful form. And as I said, my first exposure, I guess the first public thing that I wrote. Well, I used to write song parodies in junior high school and go around to classrooms and disrupted them as much as possible. But uh, when I was in college I wrote a full length musical. And you know, I think you are, ah, somewhat familiar with that form.

Steve Cuden: I am, I am.

Hal Ackerman: It is so exciting. I wrote an original book and lyrics and a friend of mine, uh, wrote an original score and it was done um, in a 500 seat theater at our college. And it was the first time anything had ever been done that way. All students stuff. That feeling of hearing, you know, 500 people laugh at something that, you know, that in my mind I thought might have been funny and wrote it down and you know, that momentum that derives itself in a musical when it’s working is like, like nothing Else, really. That’s right. You know, the audience becomes one, one organism, you know, and you have them and they’re laughing and they’re with it and they’re just electrified and know, it is so exciting. Uh, so movies can do that as well, you know, I mean, it’s publicly performed, whereas a novel, you know, you just, you don’t get that same group feedback.

Steve Cuden: Not at all.

Hal Ackerman: I like writing prose a lot. I think that for me, the writing of prose, just the writing part of it gives me more satisfaction than the writing part of a movie. But the second part, you know, the give back in, uh, you know, anything publicly performed exceeds anything that can possibly happen in a novel because, you know, people are reading it individually and, you know, you just never know. You don’t feel their response.

Steve Cuden: So you’ve also successfully written quite a few short stories and had those published too.

Hal Ackerman: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Do you like that form as well, the short form of prose? Or is that more challenging to do than anything else?

Hal Ackerman: I do like it. Uh, in fact, I’ve been, I’ve been lately writing what’s being called flash fiction or sudden fiction, which is really compressed, uh, like 500, 750 word stories. And I’ve had a few of them published. And it is really exciting because you have to really compress, you know, and the result has to be the same as in something long, which is that it makes an impact. But you have to get character and situation and circumstance and not, you know, and drama and tension, you know, all of it. But in 500 words or 700 words. Uh, it’s a great challenge. I do really like it.

Steve Cuden: It’kind of like haiku.

Hal Ackerman: Yeah, in its way, in its way a little longer obviously than haiku, but, um, I do really like it.

Steve Cuden: So which do you think is harder to do? Is that the hardest form to do, that short form?

Hal Ackerman: I think they’re all hard and all fun. Well, it’s just true.

Steve Cuden: I mean, they are. It’s true.

Hal Ackerman: You’re right, it is. You know, they’re all hard in different ways and fun in different ways.

Steve Cuden: Well, okay, so let’s talk for a moment about your novels. Let’s talk about the Stein novels, in particular Smoke and Lather, which I read recently and thoroughly enjoyed. I’I’M, um, um. No pun intended. I’m not blowing smoke or lather. I’HAD a great time reading this book. It was so much fun. Tell the listeners about Harry Stein. How did you dream him up?

Hal Ackerman: The title of the book will probably give you an idea how I Dreamed him up, uh, that smok and lather. Yes, it was a redo of Stein stoned. But, um, you know, uh, I grew up in the 60s and, uh, know marijuana was illegal, and it was all exciting, and you put towels under the door and know there was always the danger of getting something terrible happening. In fact, once something terrible did happen, uh, I’ll tell you a funny story, which is, um. When I was living in Los Angeles, I lived in the Hollywood Hills and had the house behind. The house was just upwards, but at the top there was, um, like a plot of land level, like 10 by 10. I had a little, uh, victory garden, um, uh, as I call it, uh, growing there. And the plants had gotten to be actually about as tall as I. And, um, one day, uh, my phone rings and, uh, I answer it and I get a call. And the voice says, uh, this Mr. Ekerman? I said, yeah. He said, we understand you got some marijuana growing up there’like. To talk to you about it. Uh, well, this is the police. I said, oh, uh, well, uh, Hama. Ha ha. I Jackie Gling. I said, I’t know anything about marijuana, but if you’re the police, I guess I can’t stop you from coming here. He said, well, yeah’re, we’re gonna come up in about, you know, a half hour, 45 minutes, if that’s all right. Well, here’s what I thought. I was as naive then as I was with the producers when they were saying you couldn’t find your first act. I thought they were being kind. Uh, I thought they were being, well, okay, we’ll give this guy a break. It’s. It’s just nonsense to bust somebody for a few plans. So I ran up there and started yanking them out of the ground and hurling them open the fence into somebody else’s. You know, it broke my heart to do it because I’nurtured them from seeas. And this was months, and now they’re. And after I’ve thrown about half a dozen up, they jumped out of the bushes where they were hiding and snapping pictures and putting, uh, me under arrest. And I was humiliated. My arrogance always stayed with me. I just thought, you know, cops and me. Who’s the smarter one? Well, um, no question. Of course, it’s me. Wrong again. I mean, it’s one thing to be, you know, busted by the cops being overpowered, but to be out thought it was just. It was so humiliating to me. And so I was brought downstairs, back into the house, you know, handcuffed, hands behind my back, and My dog is there licking their hands and ah, it was awful. But, uh, uh, part of that gave me the reason. But actually a first line, and this has happened occasionally, a first line came to me and I didn’t know where it came from or anything, but the line was. The phone rang too early for it to be good news. M. I thought that was a pretty damn good line. I had no idea who the phone was calling, who was on one end or the other. And then I had this character answer the phone and. And suddenly he was filled. You know, it’s early, you know who’s calling. And suddenly just a flood of, um, possibility, you know, came to me. Uh, I was divorced at the time, you know, had an ex wife and joined custody of a child, you know, and suddenly was the ex. He was dreading the ex wife’s calling. Anyway, that was the impetus. You know, suddenly when something happened, you know, it’s like playing jazz or playing, you know, three on three basketball. When you get in a groove, suddenly just, everything just starts to flow. When you’re playing jazz, you know, music just starts. You know, you find the groove. Just stuff that you never thought about just starts to happen. And if you’re playing basketball, you know, suddenly you’ve never played with these guys before, but suddenly your rhythm is found and you know, and you know when the guy’s going to cut and you know when to make the pick and you know how to switch on defense and it just starts to happen. And you. This started to happen, uh, you know, for me, with that, with that story and um, you know, it became about the stolen marijuana and. And you know, I started thinking about him and in the circumstance he was in, uh, that he used to be a real activist and uh, you know, 20 years ago, believed in the 60s because this took place in the 90s. He believed that all the ethos of the 60s, but nobody else did, everybody was gone. You know, all the hippies that he knew were either dead or in jail or become lawyers even worse. So, um, you know, and he loved that life, but there was a proscription he couldn’t live that life. Here’s something that my training in school taught me that I taught the students. And then by teaching them whatever in a movie that, you know, you want to occur, make sure that as you think of that, you are twinning it with the very thing that will prevent it from happening. Because here’s something that makes movies predictable. When the writer wants something to happen, and because they want that to happen, it happens. They cause it to happen without opposition. But if you. In the very time that you’re thinking about this, I want this to happen. You make sure that you are coming up also with something that will prevent it from happening. You have created the absolute driving blood of every good movie, which is conflict. You have desire and opposition, you know, and that creates empathy for a character. Character wants something, can’t have it. What, you know, that makes us want the character to achieve it. So, um, you know, this Harry Stein, he wanted to still to be living the life of the 60s, you know, all of that. But he had an ex wife and he had a daughter that he was crazy about that he wanted custody of. But she had put into their joint custody agreement that he is prohibited from doing anything deleterious to the upbringing of the child. So he had to get a job and cut his hair and sell the VW van and live, you know, live the appearance of. Of a, you know, a conservative life. So now that’s the given. Well, now what happens to that? Somebody who knows about his past, has had some marijuana stolen, knows about Stein’s past and plants as a gift and an inducement, uh, a bud of this incredible we that he himself has grown as an inducement for Stein to come to come help him find the weed, you know, and he’s going to pay him a great deal of money and it’s, you know, it’s a chance for him to do what he loves doing and be back in the world that he loves, but he has to keep it a secret from his family. So there’s conflict already built into every aspect of the moment to moment. And in the larger, you know, and in the larger moments. And you know he’s going to get caught. And you know what’s at stake, you know, the possible loss of his custody sh. With his daughter. That ongoing tension exists there. And he, of course, tries to resist it and tries to resist it and does resist it until something larger than that happens. This gorgeous, beautiful woman. Of course it. So, you know, it’s one of, you know, fil Noir. Gotta be, you know, who’s a friend of the, um, this marijuana dealer cultivator whose name. Oh, I got to tell you, I was swimming at the UCLA pool, okay. And, uh, I finished my lap. And on the concrete right above the pool, there is a, um, kickboard. And on the kickboard is the name of the person who owns the kickboard. And the name of that person is good Pastor. There is the name for my cultivator. I mean, it was incredible. It was just Sitting there, waiting. I mean, how do you not use that name for a cultivator? Good. Faster. I mean, it was there. And I hung around and a couple days later I saw it again and I saw the owner and I met her. We became friends. Still met. Uh, and her husband and I became friends. And she and her daughter are coming out in a couple of days to come to la. I mean, anyway, so now he resists to resist. This lovely woman comes and tries to induce him. Oh, God, he wants so bad. But she says that he’s going to be in trouble, please help us. And he can’t and he won’t. And then she gets murdered. Um, well, now he has all of that incredible guilt on his hands because he refused somebody in need, which goes against the. All the ethos of the 60s, uh, you know, that he ever believed in. So he’s guilt on top of his head, you know, so now he’s, you know, now he’s just got to be in it.

Steve Cuden: So how much of Harry Stein is you? All of it.

Hal Ackerman: How much is it? Well, I’d say. Let me see. I would say a lot of the inner life of Harry, some of the outer life in the sense of the divorce thing and the daughter. But he had more balls than I, uh. ###h and. And got much more actively involved in protest movements and, uh, brazen things that he did than I ever had the courage to actually do.

Steve Cuden: And you’ve never been a detective?

Hal Ackerman: I’ve never been a detective. That’s also true. Yes, that’s right.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that the fact that now, all these years later, cannabis in many states is now legal?

Hal Ackerman: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Whether medicinally legal or completely recreationally legal. Do you think that that makes the stories anachronistic at this point?

Hal Ackerman: That’s a good question. I don’t really know. I mean, uh, you know, at the time, I think they were like. They could have been a rallying point. Now I think it probably is more like nostalgia, I guess. I don’t really know. It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say.

Steve Cuden: It makes it a little trickier to sell as something dangerous because it’s no longer thought so.

Hal Ackerman: Yes, that’s true. But the actual danger that takes, that actually does take place, I think it could suspend your disbelief because, you know, when there are bad people taking valuable things from good people, whatever that thing may be, you know, you feel something about that. And, um, you know, part of the story goes into Amsterdam, into you, into all the coffee houses and, uh, the cannabis cup, which I think is still an interesting spectacle because not. I mean, even though cannabis is now legal, I don’t think a lot of people have actually gone to that thing. It takes you into a kind of world that even, even these days, somebody, you know, a world of like, like the 60s, uh, that people who are alive, I mean the 60s or a long time ago already.

Steve Cuden: Yes, they are.

Hal Ackerman: Yeah, they are.

Steve Cuden: Yeah. So, okay, so now you are, you’re not a detective. You didn’t come up, uh, writing detective stories. I assume that was not your bailiwick. Right. How much did you have to start to think about detailed plotting and planning before you started? Did you do outlining on this, on these books, or did you just freeform it?

Hal Ackerman: At first I tried to freeform it. And uh, I wrote about, I don’t know, 80 or so pages, which was roughly Stein driving around Los Angeles, uh, being pissed off at everything he saw and critical everything he saw. And then at certain point I looked at it and I said, who cares what, you know, what self indulgent crap this is? If anyone’s gonna, you know, be at all interested. Has to be a story. And so I then, you know what the hard work I composed, you know, a plot around that. The reason that it’s called Smoke and Lather is because it’s about smoke, which is that, you know, that marijuana smoke. And also there was a second plot, uh, which involved the job that he had, which was this boring, horrible job that he had working for a reinsurance company that kept sending him on these just ridiculously mind numingly boring jobs. The last, the most recent one that he’s involved in, uh, as the book starts, when the phone rings, which is not his ex wife, but somebody from this shampoo factory, his job has been counting empty plastic designer shampoo bottle. So the secondary plot is about counterfeit designer shampoo, something he couldn’t care less about. But it pays the thing, you know, it’s his contribution to the gross national product, which is what he has to do to satisfy his ex wife. And there are specific things that he’s called upon to do to try to solve what’s happening, you know, with this, with this missing shampoo, this missing counterfe shampoo. And it brings us into a whole other char group of characters and many of whom I invented and some of whom are based upon people that I knew. And that was so much fun. And so it was fun. It was like this push and pull I love. I’ve had this circumstance happening in many stories that I’ve written and that I’ve described where a character is pulled on from two sides. Two powerful forces that both mean a lot to the character pulling him. I described it as a trout being caught by anglers on two sides of a stream. So he has this thing going on and it leads to, uh, two different things. It lead to the possibility of a structure of alternating a chapter about this and a chapter about that and being pulled from here to there and from there to here. It allowed for real interesting movement in the story. Uh, it allowed the possibility of when the action goes to, you know, like the shampoo plot and then it can come back to the marijuana plot by implying action that you don’t even have to necessarily describe. You can jump ahead, uh, of something that has happened and make reference to it without having to actually go through it. So they were complimeentary to each other. And the Stein Sung story, which was about bees, honeybees being sten, did the same thing. There was that plot and there was a secondary plot. Um, I enjoy that. It’s fun to work that way. And um, that sort came to be my own little bible.

Steve Cuden: In the three books, did you need to do a lot of research beyond having smoked marijuana? Did you need to do a lot of research?

Hal Ackerman: Yes. In the one about honeybees, I spent, uh, quite a lot of time in the Central Valley, uh, in the almond groves, um, among, uh, the beekeepers. They are a really, really interesting lot. The bees are like migrant workers. They are carried there’at hundreds of millions of them, uh, are brought season to season, mostly in the arm because the almonds have become very, very profitable. And more and more land has been dedicated to almonds. And they require pollination at the same time. So millions of bees are there working, uh, and then they go up north to the cherry orchards, you know, and these people are really, really re. Migratory. Really interesting folks. Uh, so. And that was fun.

Steve Cuden: So I want to ask you this question that I ask many people on the show that I’m curious to hear your answer. Yeah, you’ve obviously dealt with lots of stories in your career, in life and many students and your own. What for you makes a good story.

Hal Ackerman: Good for me, what involves me is, uh, characters, especially characters that I don’t know very well into whose life I can dwell, whose life becomes interesting by the things that they are, that they want and. And are withheld from them. Generally the poignancy of trying to find something true and meaningful U. Uh, in a world that uh, does not support that very often, you know, the many Combinations of we don’t know ourselves often, you know, what it is we really want. And then if we ever discover what that is, you know, finding it, whether it exists or not, and if it exists, whether it is available to us or not, you know, all of those poignant things, uh, you know, trying to find some modicum of happiness for real in a world in which. Where the attainment of that is difficult, uh, and comes sometimes by surprise and doesn’t last as long as we wish. And so stories that can touch that. And so, you know, and stories do that in such incredibly different ways. You know, films, novels, you know, the quest for something lasting and meaningful in characters, you know, that we can believe and they don’t have to be good people. So I’d say for me, it’s that.

Steve Cuden: Well, you know, uh, I think part of it, and you’ve already spoken about it today, which is that I think part of what makes a great story great or a good story good is this notion of conflict that you’re drawn in by that conflict. And I did want to point out for the listeners that you taught me one of the great formulas of all time in terms of being a storyteller. And that’s the formula of C equals D O, conflict equals desire plus an obstacle. I got that from you.

Hal Ackerman: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And I’ve repeated it hundreds and hundreds of times to people. And it’s a very important concept. And I think that that concept, once you have that, and you have it in spades in your books, is once you have that conflict set up, you get drawn to the protagonist or whatever characters you’re dealing with at that moment.

Hal Ackerman: Yes.

Steve Cuden: As long as they’re in conflict, especially with other characters.

Hal Ackerman: Yes. I mean, what you just described is the craft that, uh, is required to accomplish, you know, that other thing.

Steve Cuden: Yes. Because you have to have that emotion, the emotional part of it.

Hal Ackerman: Yes. Yes.

Steve Cuden: Without it, it’s just, you know, stuff. It doesn’t relate to humans, and we have to relate to it in some way.

Hal Ackerman: Yes. When you talked about difference between form and format, one of the very early things that I do in a class, um, because when. When we’re in high school or, you know, whenever we’re learning to read books and, uh, teachers who have never written teach the book. I don’t know if that’s your experience, but almost universally they’ll say. What they will open a conversation about is, what’s the theme of this book? You know, what is the writer trying to teach? Because so many, you know, so many we read like aesop’s Fables when we’re children. And, you know, the purpose of that is to teach a lesson. And, you know, teachers will look at theme. You know, what is the meaning of it? And, uh, very often beginning writers will start with the notion of a theme. What this is meant to mean. I draw a circle on the board, and I write the board theme in the middle of it. And then I put a big line through it, and it like a traffic sign that says, you can’t go here. And I say, I don’t want you to think about theme. Because if you have a theme, you will be locked into making the theme of that story come out. You know, adultery leads to murder. That’s the theme of the story. Well, once there’s been adultery, you know, you can tell there’s going to be a murder. So I then erase the word theme in there. And I write in the word that you just mentioned, which is desire. Right. And that. That has to be the driving force. What does a character want? What are they going to do to get it? And I use that stupid word, uh, wadugi, which means, what does the character want for the wa. And what does the character do, you know, to get it? Want. Do g. What want do get. And makes. That makes it unpredictable. And it allows, you know, what might be called, um, you know, antiheroes, uh, to become the center of stories. Um, you know, and I often use. The first example that always comes to mind is one of the first movies I saw a long time ago called Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s first movie, which is about two girls that want to. Just want to be together. It’s based on a true story. Um, that’s all they want. And their parents want to separate them. And there’s the. There is the basic conflict of every scene in that movie. Somebody wants to be together. Somebody wants to separate them. Like in all the President’s Men. They want to cover the story. Bad guys want to, you know, they want to uncover. Rather, the bad guys want to cover up, cover up, uncover. You know, every scene is about that conflict. Anyway, in Heavenly Creatures, in order to accomplish what they want, they bash with a brick. They bash one of the mother’s heads in. Well, you know, uh, if that was a movie about theme, you would have to hate these girls. You would have to so hate them. How do you go? You can’t say matri sign is cool. But, uh, because this story is based on desire, not on theme. Intimacy goes with desire. Those two things are, uh, have to be locked together. We have to we have to be deep into not their underwear drawer, but what is important to them morally, consciously in, in their lives. And what these girls wanted was to be together. You know, that was their intimacy. And we invested in that. And we actually, in a strange kind of way, forgave that because we were intimate with them and a more distant from the parents. They just existed as an oppositional force.

Steve Cuden: But they had to build empathy for those two girls early on or the audience would not have locked ono them.

Hal Ackerman: Exactly. Exactly. The beginning of the Godfather. Um, um, you know, somebody comes to him and, you know, this is, this is brilliant. It’a brilliant, brilliant opening. Somebody comes, tells this great, great story about what happened to his daughter, you know, who can’t relate to the horrible thing, and then compounds it. He went to the cops. He was a good American. And they, you know, they let the boys off with a suspended sentence. You know, this guy was just absolutely humiliated. And even if we don’t have a daughter who’s had that happen, you know, we all understand what humiliation feels like. We all know what it feels like to do the right thing and be thwarted. And he was so on our side. We wanted good for him because he had suffered. And he comes to the Godfather and whispers, you know, what do he wants? And we know what he’s whispered. And every one of us, I absolutely know thisd to be true. We’re waiting for, you know, for the Godfather to say, yes, we will waste those fuckers. And that’s what the audience wanted. And he said, no, you know, you’re asking for murder. These boys didn’t kill your daughter. And from the beginning of that story, the Godfather has a higher moral conscious than everyone else in the audience. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. It could have opened with, you know, with him machine gunning an olive, you know, Factory. Sure, uh, which heably has done. But the opening of a scene, I mean, the opening of the movie is so important because it is through that you invest. You know, it’s not just once upon a time. It’s, you know, we invest in the character by what action we place that character into at the beginning of the story.

Steve Cuden: 100% true. There’s no reason in the world why we should like Randall Patrick McMurphy in one flow over the cuckoo’s nest. Mean, he’s a loathsome character, but we absolutely love him because he takes care of these guys and he takes these mentally challenged guys and he cares for them. So by his caring for them, we care for him.

Hal Ackerman: Right.

Steve Cuden: And yet he’s not anyone you’d want in your house for 20 minutes.

Hal Ackerman: Ye.

Steve Cuden: And so, I mean that’s, that’s a miracle to me when a, uh, story comes out and it can get there. The Stein books, I mean, you have characters in there that are not particularly nice people. They’re a little bit offbeat and a little bit, you know, they’re just not nice. But they are people that we care about. Because of the way you’ve developed them, do you think those books are ever going to get made into movies or TV series? I think they should be.

Hal Ackerman: Well, I would love it if that happened. It hasn’t yet, of course. You know, I think it would be a terrific series. Uh, you know, again, uh, a throwback into a different era. A renegade. Uh, you know, we like renegades at any time. And um, yeah, I would like it to have.

Steve Cuden: I for one would watch. And I think that Harry’s a great character. He’s a nice, laid back, laconic character that’s very smart, but he’s challenged at every step and I think that that’s what makes him wonderful to watch. Well, I have been having the most fun conversation I’ve had in a while with my old professor, Hal Ackerman, and we’re going toa wind the show down just a little bit. You know, you’ve told us a whole lot of really fantastic advice as usual, but I’m wondering if you have a story that you can share with us. It’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, or just plain funny. More than you’ve already told us?

Hal Ackerman: Well, I have several, really. When I first came. Well, two funny things happened when I first came out to la. Somebody gave me the number of an agent and I called and his secretary said, oh, he’s, you know, he’s on another call and get back to you. Well, I sat at the phone, you know, because somebody said he’s going toa get back. And so I said, well, well, didn’t get back that day. Uh, this went on for about the next month, maybe longer. And uh, maybe longer. I mean, I kept really expecting that he was going to call back because I would call every day. And finally, um, he called back and we talked and uh, you know, said he sent me and he said, okay, you know, send the script. Well, I didn’t want to risk mailing it. So I, you know, so I brought it there, uh, left it there and early in the morning and I thought to myself, let’s see, should I call in the afternoon, you know, give him a Couple hours to read it. I wait to the next day. Yeah, so about, I don’t know, I guess I started calling a few days later and again that went on and finally probably after a month, you know he called and brought me in for a meeting so. Oh great. Came in, you know so happy, you know a little bit, a little bit pissed that it took that long from to read the scri. But um, gratified that finally didn’t recognize you know the value of it. So he said, you know, want them to ass sign me? I said oh you know that’s really good. I saw you like the script. He said well I haven’t really read it but I liked your persistence. So the first meeting he sets me up with is with um, A uh, French director, I think his name was Christian Marquan. And uh, he was ah, living in Malibu. Wow, Malibu. You know, just the word sounds so rich. So my girlfriend, I guess I don’t think I was married at the time yet. We decided to you know drive out there like an hour earlier. You know, just get a sense of maly. You know it was golden, it was wintertime and you know, which means it was 70 degrees and gorgeous and you know people come voing on the beach, you know thinking that that’s what you’re doing in the winterime. And you know I’m from New York and I don’t know to if you freezeing the winter you don’t play on the beach. But. All right, so uh, comes you know the meeting time, 4:00. You know in Malibu the entrance of the houses are on the beach, not on the road. So you know you walk around and ring the bell, no answer. Ring the bell, no answer. Ring the bell. And alongside the door there’s sort of like a semi translucent uh glass panels and so you can see it’s not transparent but you can get a sense of motion inside. And what I’m thinking of seeing is several scantily or unclad females running about. And um, he, Marquan opens the door and he’s heavy lided, sleepy eyed, wearing a robe, looking at me and having no the fuck idea who I am and what I’m doing here. The only thing the agent had neglected to do was to send a script to him or tell him that I was coming.

Steve Cuden: But there you were.

Hal Ackerman: There I were. So he said give me a half hour. So we walk around and you know, I think we should just leave. You know we come in, know he’s gracious, we have a glass of wine and, you know, he doesn’t know why I’m there. He’s read. Read the script. And so we just beat a polit retreat.

Steve Cuden: May I assume that that was a no sale?

Hal Ackerman: Yes. Yeah. So that was interesting. Uh, another m. Much shorter story, um, but kind of poignant. Uh, the very first party that I went to had gotten a mentor, a, uh, man who died, but I really treasure my relationship with. His name was Leonard Stern. M. He had d. Written you for the Honeymooners, and he created Mad Libs and created a bunch of. Bunch of shows. And just the loveliest, loveliest, um, man. When I was writing for him, working with him, we worked together on a script and keptul later the studio, he sent the bouquet of flowers to my wife. I mean, just gracious. He also gave me the best critique. It was three words, uh, to a script that I’ve ever gotten. Uh, three words were, write this better.

Steve Cuden: Write this better.

Hal Ackerman: Write this better. That was your reaction to something I turned in once. Uh, didn’t.

Steve Cuden: Wasn’t he also a publisher?

Hal Ackerman: Yes, yes. In fact, his company published my screenwriting book. It was called Tall Fellow Press. But, um, there was a party, and I think it was at his house, and there was a lot of luminaries there, but among them was Philip Epstein. Now, Philip Epstein, uh, if the name rings a bell to you, maybe you’ll talk to your listeners. Wrote Casablanca.

Steve Cuden: That’s all.

Hal Ackerman: That’s all.

Steve Cuden: Along with his brother Julius. Right?

Hal Ackerman: Along with Julius, yes. So, um, in fact, it was Julius that was there. Come to think of it, it was Julius that was there. Thank, uh, you for correcting me. It was Julius that was there. And, uh, you know, it. With great trepidation, you know, I came up to him, you know, bowed deeply, and, you know, as one would. You got a book, the hundred greatest lines. You know, in movies. He’s got 30 of them, of course. So, you know, I say, sir, I had an opening because somehow I knew that he’d grown up in Brooklyn near Ocean Parkway, and I had lived near Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. So it was my way of sort of getting some sort of contact. Like, why else. Why would he possibly care about talking to this, you know, Anyway? So I. I say, sir. Councilsellanca. Um, he said, ah, Ah, was a big mess. That was not what I expected to hear. Said, yeah, yeah, they messed it all up. It. It was a mishmash. Uh, and then he said something that I will never forget. He said, they cut my last line. Well, the last line, contact blank is fairly well known. He’s fairly well known. And so, and I say, I said my, you know, I was Jackie Gleason. Something was hama ha, you know, again I said, may want to have the temerity to ask, sir, you know what that last line was? Well, you know, last night it was the beginning of the beautiful friendship. And said he said his last line was, but you’still only 5,000, 50,000 francs. Or know I. That’s a good enough, you know. So whether his last line was better or whether a better to be cut. What I came away with was here is this giant. Here is somebody that everybody looks up to. And the first thing he says to somebody he has just met 40 years after it has happened is that they cut his last night. He’s still fucking pissed off all this time later, despite everything that he has to tell this person who he’s never met, he’s still growling at him. And I understood at that moment what the life of a screenwriter was going to be, you know, that this is, you know, he has achieved the best one could possibly wish for. And he is still fucking irked at what has happened to him. Uh, because we don’t know our copyright.

Steve Cuden: Because he didn’t ultimately own all of it himself. And what he owned in his mind was not what they did.

Hal Ackerman: Exactly. Yep.

Steve Cuden: And so he’s bitter about it. There’s a great deal of truth, isn’t there, in the notion of art and artists? That an artist will look at a piece of work that they’ve done and it could be Picasso or Matisse or whoever, and they see all the things that are wrong with it that they didn’t get right, uh, that they could have done better if they’d only had more time or thought about it in time. And yet we all see it as this, this incredible piece of art. They see all the scenes they see where it’s all sewn together and doesn’t work for them.

Hal Ackerman: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And that’s true for writers, particularly writers, because. Because the words are so malleable.

Hal Ackerman: I went to a reading of a. I forget what guy’s name now, but it was at, um, the Music center downtown la. It was a, you know, group of people. And this guy was reading it. And what he was reading from was a book that had just won the Pulitzer Prize, okay? And there’s a Q and A afterwards. And somebody raises his hand and he’s got the book. I said, sir, I was, you know, kind of. I thought we had the sameition. But, uh, there were some lines, you know, that, uh, you know, in my book that you didn’t read, and there were some others that weren’t in my edition that, you know, that you did read. And the writer sheepishly turned it was the exact same edition of the book, turned it around so he could see it. And in that book that has just won the Pulitzer Prize is crossed out a bunch of lines written in pen.

Steve Cuden: You know, Stephen Sondheim, who I consider to be the greatest musical theater writer of all. That’s just my own particular taste and opinion. He notoriously kept fiddling around with classics years after they were great successes. I mean, he fiddled around with west side story 40 years, 50 years after it had been a huge hit on Broadway and was well known and so on. So, yeah, artists, they’re never satisfied with the end of the work. I don’t think it’s the audience that becomes satisfied.

Hal Ackerman: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. I forget what French porter was that said, no work of artists ever finished, only abandoned.

Steve Cuden: I think that’s right. All right, so last question for you today. How can you share with us, obviously, more than you’ve given us, a piece of advice that you think is useful for those that are just starting out in the business or maybe they’ve been in, uh, a little bit and trying to get to that next level?

Hal Ackerman: Well, the best I can say is create inventory. Uh, don’t think that the first thing that you do is precious. You know, don’t harbor the illusion that that is going to be the thing that is going to be. That’s going to send you into the stratosphere. Don’t try to second guess trends. And I think the really important thing is don’t doubt your own life. You know, I never remember who among your students was there at the same time as each other, but, um, this past summer, uh, a student named, uh, Nicole Reigl, um, had a film that came out called Dandelion. It’s her second film. And I remember, um, when she came into class the first time, she’s from West Virginia, and, um, at the end of the first meeting, what, everyone was introducing themselves. M. She stayed late. She stayed afteroo and said she had real doubts that she belonged here at all. Listening to the qualifications and the experience that everybody. Oh, the, you know, classmates had, uh, she said, you know, she comes to this little holler, uh, you know, in West Virginia, and does anything that she has to say have any relevance? And she doubted it. And I said, first of all, you’re here, and that means that whatever you have already produced, you know, was enough. For us to say this person, you know, has something. But I really did try to encourage her to say that for her not to doubt her life and that if she could tell the truth about the characters in her life, this would mean that she could write something that no other human being on the planet could write. And I think that all of us have something of that. Whether we come from the holler or we come from the, you know, San Fenando Ballley, where there seems to be everybody just like us. We all have a story that nobody else in the universe can tell in the same way that we can tell it. And I think that if we give honor to that truth and write that as a, you know, as a sample of who we are, that movie may not get made, that script may not be made. But that will be the thing that will, uh, highlight your talent as somebody can create characters and dialogue and truth and empathy. And that will get, you know, that can get you, um, you know, assignment. Somebody is looking for somebody who can do just that. They see that script, they say, okay, this writer, you know, you’ve never been to Hawaii, but this story takes place in Hawaii. But it’s about characters like the ones that you wrote about in Tennessee. Uh, we’re going to fly it. Hawaii, whatever. That experience has duplicated itself, replicated itself many times in the experience that I’ve had with students. So.

Steve Cuden: Well, this is, of course, as I expected, such wise advice. Because what I think a lot of people forget when they’re trying to start a career is they try to be like, what’s in the world, what’s in Hollywood, what’s out in the theaters. Instead of trying to be who they are, they’re trying to be what other people are.

Hal Ackerman: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And just be you and do the best you can with that. Because it’s never as. As Julius Epstein points out, it’s never going to be perfect for you.

Hal Ackerman: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Even if you’ve written what everybody else thinks is perfect.

Hal Ackerman: Right.

Steve Cuden: So do the best that you can and create that art, I think, for yourself, I think, create it not for others. Create it for what makes you happy.

Hal Ackerman: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: That’s how I look at it, anyway.

Hal Ackerman: Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Steve Cuden: Hal Ackerman, this has been so much fun today, and I cannot thank you enough for your second trip down this road with me. And I thank you for your wisdom and for your energy and for just being you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.

Hal Ackerman: Well, I had a great time being here. If I could plug one particular little product. Sure.

Steve Cuden: Please.

Hal Ackerman: There’s a thing called Creative Live, and I have a video on there. It’s called the Art of the First Draft. And people who might be, uh, interested in sort of taking the semblance of a class. It’s offered pretty inexpensively. And I would, uh, say that if anyone enjoyed, you know, hearing our conversation, they might Enjoy investing about 15 or 20 buks.

Steve Cuden: Do you know what the site is so that we can make sure that we put it up?

Hal Ackerman: It’s called Creat Live Creative.

Steve Cuden: Is it creativelive.com/ah I believe so, yes. We’ll make sure that we put it up on the website as well. For anyone that’s missed it.

Hal Ackerman: I appreciate that.

Steve Cuden: Hal. Thank you so much for doing this. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.

Hal Ackerman: No more than me. It’s great talking to you.

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 StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.