Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Paul Chitlik: There’s the kind of note that you get from somebody that’s paying you, and there’s the kind of notes that you’re getting somebody that’s not paying you. So the ones that are not paying you, you listen to. And if you get the same note from two people, you have to think about it. If you get the same note from three people, then you have to make some changes. If you get the note from somebody that’s paying you, you have to either make the change if it works for your story or you have to say, you know, I tried to make that work, but I can’t. Do you have an idea on how I can make that work? Flip it over to them.

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, Paul Chitlik, is making his second appearance on story. Paul has written for all the major networks and studios in both English and Spanish. He was story editor for the New Twilight Zone and staff writer for the Showtime sitcom Brothers. Hes directed episodes and been coordinating producer for real stories of the Highway Patrol and US Customs Classified. He wrote and produced Alien Abduction, the first network movie shot on digital video. For UPN. He wrote, produced, and directed Ringling Brothers revealed, a, special for the Travel Channel, which was right up his alley because years earlier he’d been a roustabout about for circus Vargas. Paul has written features for Reicher Entertainment, new image, promark, mainline releasing, and others. Most recently, he wrote, produced, and directed the Wedding dress for Amazon Prime. Paul was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award for his work on the Twilight Zone and a GLAAD Media Award nomination for Telemundos los Beltran. He also won a Genesis Award for Showtime family movie. Paul has taught in the MFA programs at UCLA, the University of Barcelona’s Film school, Cuba’s Film school, EICTV, Chile’s Film school, UNIACc, the University of Sullia in Venezuela, the Pan American University in Mexico City, the story Academy of Sweden, and as a clinical associate professor at Loyola Marymount University. Paul’s latest novel is lies, all lies. I’ve read lies, all lies and found it to be one of the most entertaining works of fiction about behind the scenes Hollywood I’ve had the pleasure to peruse. He’s also the author of one of the most indispensable must read books for anyone interested in writing screenplays, teleplays, plays, and even novels called rewrite. For the record, I was one of Paul’s students during my days in graduate school at UCLA. Without question, Paul’s teachings have remained exceptionally influential on me for both my own writing and in my subsequent years as a college professor of screenwriting. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s a terrific joy for me to welcome back to story today the writer, producer, director and teacher, my friend, Paul Chitlik. Paul, welcome to the show for the second time.

Paul Chitlik: Thank you, Steve. You really made me smile. It’s been a long time. You were in my class. It must be about 15 years ago, maybe a little longer than that.

Steve Cuden: 1415 years ago is correct.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah. Great, class. I remember that we had a lot of very outstanding students in that class.

Steve Cuden: You among them, and a lot of fun.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah. And I thought at that time, what’s he doing in my class? He knows too much.

Steve Cuden: Apparently. I didn’t know enough. You know, it’s very interesting. When I went to school, I went to school to get the MFA, and I’d already been in the business a long time. And I thought to myself, I’m going to go take these classes. I’m going to work my way through it. Nobody’s going to teach me anything I don’t already know. Boy, was I wrong. I’ve never been more wrong in my whole life. I learned so much in that school.

Paul Chitlik: Oh, that’s great. I’m glad to hear that.

Steve Cuden: I was. Like many writers, I only understood what I was doing by observing other scripts and movies and tv shows. I didn’t understand the academic part of it or the inner workings of it at all.

Paul Chitlik: Well, you know, there’s two ways to approach talking about screenwriting. One way is from the point of view of a screenwriter, and the other is, from the point of view of somebody that has observed screenwriting. And that’s where we have the guy that wrote Story McKee. You have mcKee. And you have people that wrote screenplay. Those people have watched screenplays and watched movies, but they’ve not really produced any of them themselves. Once you get into producing it yourself, producing a screenplay, meaning writing a screenplay, it’s a whole different way of looking at things. And I think you need to hear from both sides to really get a good idea of how to write a screenplay.

Steve Cuden: Well, there’s no question there have been many successful screenwriters who had no education of any kind, even didn’t even get through high school, and turned out to be great screenwriters. So that’s a very possible thing to do. And in fact, in my case, I had, a degree in the theater, but I had no writing degree. So I thought that school was really going to be a waste of my time, other than to get the degree. But I was completely wrong. It was very fulfilling and filled me up with all kinds of information that I had no idea about prior to.

Paul Chitlik: Well, I’m glad, you know, I started screenwriting without any idea. Well, I hadn’t had one class in formal screenwriting, was, writing the television movie all, ah, the other classes. I had one other class in the role of the screenwriter in television. But it didn’t talk about how, ah, to write a script. I, just got thrown into it and I had to do a lot of reading. And my first job in, screenwriting was writing for a show called guilty or innocent. And I was the executive story editor and wrote the pilot of this show. Really had no idea what I was.

Steve Cuden: Well, how did you get that job with no experience?

Paul Chitlik: Well, that’s a good question because I had been trying to get a job as a screenwriter because I had been a college administrator and college teacher in ESL English as a second language. And, one day I was standing at the blackboard substituting for one of my teachers. I had, ah, 14 teachers working for me, and 45 student aids and a population of 450 students from all around the world. And I was standing there and a little voice in my head as I was writing on the board said, this is not the plan. I realized, yeah, it wasn’t. So I started to, look into other forms of making a living by writing. And I found that writing novels, the average novelist made at that time, $850 a year, I thought, well, that’s not going to support my Austin Healy, or my two bedroom apartment in Hollywood, which I had m. Or my parking space, or my secretary. That’s not going to do it. So I looked into writing for the screen, and I found out that there are ways to make a living doing that. I wrote some, teleplays, and I sent one to an agent, and the tellplay was called Casanova Goldberg, okay? And it was about an older guy who worked in the catskills. He, was a, what they called a tumler. That’s the director of activities, basically, at one of these large resorts. And he falls in love with his assistant, who’s 50 years younger than he is now. As it turned out, the agent that read my script was 78 and his girlfriend was 18. No, he related to the script. He called me and he said, I think you got something here. And he’s the one that got me that job on, guilty or innocent.

Steve Cuden: Where did you come up with being a writer? When did that start for you? At what age were you when you thought, I want to write in anything?

Paul Chitlik: It would have to be when I was in college, my last year of college, I was thinking, what am I going to do when I get out?

Steve Cuden: Where was this?

Paul Chitlik: This was at the University of California at Berkeley. Okay. So I was a comparative literature major, and I was a comparative literature major because when I had to declare a major going into my junior year, I laid down all the courses that I had taken and all the courses that I was planning to take, and then I looked at, what are the majors that fit into that group of courses? And it was comparative literature, because I was going to Spain for my junior year abroad.

Steve Cuden: Okay?

Paul Chitlik: Taking a lot of spanish literature classes and doing that. I started to think, well, maybe I can be a writer. And when I graduated from college, I went back to Spain and I started writing. my first published work is in Spanish. It’s a poem in Spanish in porcia espanola. And then, I tried to write there, and I thought, you know, I’m losing control over my English. I was hardly speaking any English at all during that time. And I had a spanish speaking girlfriend. I had, all my friends were Spanish speaking. All, my media was spanish speaking. So I decided I had to move out of Spain, and I went to England, and I lived there for four years. And I started writing novels, which were terrible, really. The first two novels I wrote there were just, awful.

Steve Cuden: Isn’t that the way it works, though?

Paul Chitlik: Well, you have to have a failure to get a success. I also was translating novels and writing for magazines. Ah. And newspapers. And eventually I was working for a news Service and, writing to deadline. This is why I’m a very fast writer. I had a deadline every day at 04:00. Not 04:01, but 04:00. Had to take it over to Reuters to get it on the wire. So I started writing there. And then again, I thought, I’m losing my american. I wanted to go back and live in the States because I was saying, let’s go rent a lorry, and we’ll drive the stuff over to the warehouse and go up in the lift. And I thought, nah, that’s not going to work if I’m going to write stuff about my own background and what I know. So I moved back to the States, and then. And then there’s a long story. Then I got sucked up into the ESL. First I worked as a translator. Then I worked as, an ESL instructor. Then I became a college administrator.

Steve Cuden: Well, how young were you when you started to speak Spanish?

Paul Chitlik: it wasn’t until I got to college that I started to work in Spanish. I had taken French in high school, and at the time, there was a requirement at UC Berkeley to have two years of a foreign language, and you could pass out of that if you took the test. And, so I took the test in French, and I didn’t pass because, you know, I studied French barely in high school. So they gave me a choice. You can take french for no credit for two years, or you can take Spanish and get credit. I thought, well, that’s not really a choice. I’ll take the Spanish. And so I took the Spanish. And then, this is Berkeley in the sixties, and there was a lot of unrest on campus, I guess is the best way to call it.

Steve Cuden: Yes.

Paul Chitlik: And I was kind of bored with college, and I was thinking, I don’t really want to be here. So I applied to study abroad in Colombia, in Bogota, because I was learning Spanish, et cetera, et cetera. I went in for the interview, and I kind of fumbled through the interview with very poor Spanish, I have to admit. but they called me up, the next day, and they said, we have good news and bad news. And I said, oh, what’s the Good news? And they said, well, the Good news is you got into the program in Bogota. I said, well, that’s great. What’s the bad news? And they said, we’re canceling the program in Bogota.

Steve Cuden: Oh, gosh.

Paul Chitlik: But would you like to go to Madrid instead? And I said, oh, okay. that’s a good idea. So the program in Madrid was a year long program, and you’re totally immersed, because all my classes were with spanish students, and they were all in Spanish. And I walked and talked and spoke and did everything, went to the movies in Spanish, did everything in Spanish. But I knew the least amount of Spanish of any of the UC students that went there, and I felt really stupid. So I resolved to learn Spanish. And every day, I wrote down every new word that I learned in a little notebook. And every night I studied those words before I went to bed. And every morning, before I got out of bed, I studied those words. So by Christmas time, I, got there in August. By Christmas time I was fluent. And by May, when I was going to be leaving, I was mistaken for a native.

Paul Chitlik: So I don’t speak that well now you can hear me and you’d say, he’s not an american, but I don’t know where he’s from. It used to be you could say what barrio I, lived in in Madrid, you could tell from my accent.

Steve Cuden: Did you speak Spanish? You were so good that you lost your american accent in the Spanish.

Paul Chitlik: In Spanish? Yeah, I totally lost my american accent. People thought I was from the university barrio in, Madrid.

Steve Cuden: That’s amazing.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah, I don’t have that anymore. I still have fluent Spanish, but I don’t have the sharp accent that I used to.

Steve Cuden: You can read and write it fluently?

Paul Chitlik: Oh, I read, yeah, I read Spanish and write Spanish fluently. I’ve taught in Spanish.

Steve Cuden: And you’ve taught in Spanish?

Paul Chitlik: Yeah, in all those places in Cuba, in Venezuela, in Chile, in Spain, I’ve taught in Spanish.

Steve Cuden: I think that’s awesome because I have none of that capability at all.

Paul Chitlik: Well, you know, I think everybody in the United States should speak another language. And certainly in Los Angeles, if you don’t speak Spanish, you’re left out of a lot. And, I spoke Spanish every day in Los Angeles.

Steve Cuden: Did you understand the nuances of drama versus comedy in Spanish?

Paul Chitlik: Oh, yeah, eventually. Not at first. At first, the movies were above my head. I mean, I couldn’t understand anything in movies for quite a long time. It’s harder to understand that. but eventually I could get spanish humor. I know jokes. I learned jokes in Spanish. I told jokes in Spanish. I’ve made up some jokes in Spanish, as a matter of fact, for Los Peltran when I was working on that show. So, yeah, I’ve done it.

Steve Cuden: To my way of thinking, it’s hard enough for a native speaker to do, I’ll use the word again, nuanced comedy, which is a very specific kind of way to think of how do you form a sentence and how does that then impact the punchline or whatever it would be in your own native tongue? That’s hard enough, let alone in a foreign tongue.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah, it is a skill and it does take practice and work. Right now I’m consulting on a colombian, ah, sitcom that a friend of mine is working on. And, it’s in English and in Spanish.

Steve Cuden: Is it a video of some kind? Is it going to be subtitled?

Paul Chitlik: We don’t know how they’re going to do that yet. It hasn’t been sold. He’s just working with a production company in Colombia. And when they sell it, we’ll figure out what parts we have to subtitle. We’ll probably subtitle both. So if people are speaking in English, we’ll subtitle in Spanish, and if they’re speaking in Spanish, we’ll subtitle in English.

Steve Cuden: So I’ve never had anyone to ask this question of before, which is fascinating. to me, you have obviously seen, movies in Spanish that you understood what they were saying and then saw the english subtitles underneath. How accurate are those? Usually.

Paul Chitlik: I couldn’t put a percentage on it, but I would say about 80% accurate. sometimes they miss the nuance, sometimes they just summarize. But most of the time, they’re pretty good. Have you seen money? heist?

Steve Cuden: Money, heist. I have not.

Paul Chitlik: It’s a spanish series on Netflix. and their subtitles are pretty good, but every once in a while, they just miss some of the nuance in Spanish.

Steve Cuden: Well, I know that when I was writing cartoons, most of the cartoons I wrote wound up being produced overseas somewhere, whether it was in Tokyo or in Korea or someplace like that. And they would come back and the timing of things were off because they weren’t understanding the English, how we told the joke, and so you’d get the animation back and the timing would be all off.

Paul Chitlik: Oh, that’s. That’s a problem.

Steve Cuden: Yeah, it’s a real problem.

Paul Chitlik: It’s difficult going from language to language because it’s not only the words are different, the way of thinking is different. If you’re talking to a person that speaks German who puts the verb at the end of the sentence, you have a different way of looking at things. If you talk to a spanish speaking person where the adjectives come after the noun instead of before the noun, and the verb can come anywhere in the sentence. As a matter of fact, there’s a certain formal way of writing that the verb is quite often at the end of the sentence as well. It’s a different way of thinking and different way of approaching thought.

Steve Cuden: So let’s talk about lies. All lies. Your new novel.

Paul Chitlik: Thank you.

Steve Cuden: Have you produced it in Spanish as well?

Paul Chitlik: No, I haven’t done that, but what I am doing right now, I’ve been asked to adapt it into, a, series, a limited series. Oh. So I’m writing the pilot right now.

Steve Cuden: How cool.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah, it’s very cool. And it’s very interesting adapting that. I don’t know if it would do well in Spanish because it’s so specific to television. It’s about a television writer, producer, actor who has amnesia. And I’m changing the reason he has amnesia from the book, to the series because I think it’s a little bit more interesting if I do it this way. But he has amnesia because he was involved in a car accident, and he doesn’t know who he is or why he’s there or who is this gorgeous woman he’s standing next to soaking wet at the poolside of the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. But now, I think I’m going to have to. In Spanish, it’s going to be difficult to adapt because he’s very, immersed in television production in the United States.

Steve Cuden: I think in the various spanish speaking countries, they understand television production, although they may not look, as far as I know, the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t understand what happens in Hollywood.

Paul Chitlik: True. But they want to know.

Steve Cuden: They do want to know, but I’m saying they wouldn’t know if you were literally making up everything, which you were not. They wouldn’t know the difference because they aren’t sure how that works anyway. And frankly, they don’t need to know, and they shouldn’t care how it works. They just want to know what the end product looks like.

Paul Chitlik: Right.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Paul Chitlik: It’s not a story about television, when I think about it. It’s a story about a guy who’s m finding out that his Life at this point was probably not what it should have been. And his personality is not what it should have been.

Steve Cuden: Well, let’s be brutally honest. He’s a bit of a jerk.

Paul Chitlik: He’s a jerk, exactly. And he has to figure out why he was like that, what he wants to do about that, and how he can change, and then how that means he can change other people’s lives for the better.

Steve Cuden: So you’ve got a situation that on its surface seems quite dramatic, and yet you’ve managed to infuse in it a whole lot of funny stuff.

Paul Chitlik: Thank you.

Steve Cuden: And so it’s both a drama and a comedy. I dare not use the term dramedy because I don’t think it is, but it has a lot of serious stuff in it, and yet it’s funny at the same time, which I think is really hard to pull off. That was your intention, I assume.

Paul Chitlik: Yes, of course. everything I do has got humor in it. I mean, when I talk to my wife, I laugh. Fortunately, we were just talking about it yesterday. We make each other laugh still. We’ve been married. It was our anniversary yesterday. We’ve been married 14 years. But we’ve been, together for 17 years. Much longer than my first wife, I have to say, which is interesting. Ah, but humor is a part of Life, and if you don’t have humor in a book, I’d be bored.

Steve Cuden: Well, there’s certainly lots of very famous, successful books that have no humor in them at all.

Paul Chitlik: How much humor is there in war and peace?

Steve Cuden: Well, exactly. Or the brothers Karamazov, or most of Hemingway.

Paul Chitlik: Right. Almost all of Hemingway. but, yeah, I also like to read Carl Heisen, you know, because he’s so funny. But also, he’s also deep. And we read Holden Caulfield because he was also amusing. Yeah. As well, being deep.

Steve Cuden: It’s like you’ve got Vonnegut out there doing very serious stories, but they’re hilariously funny.

Paul Chitlik: They’re hysterical. One of my favorite writers. and so I’ve modeled my writing after a combination of all those people, because I want people to read it, and I want them to be amused, as well as having their thoughts provoked.

Steve Cuden: So the famous old cliche line is that dying is easy. Comedy is hard. And I know it’s almost impossible to figure out why or how, but do you have a sense of what makes comedy so difficult to do well and what makes it work well?

Paul Chitlik: I always tell my students, and, I’ve always used this when I was writing comedy. Comedy is surprise. That doesn’t frighten you. So you have to come up with something different that doesn’t frighten you, that amazes you and will make you laugh. And that’s the way we confront surprises. We laugh usually, or we’re afraid. So I don’t want people to be afraid when they’re reading my books or watching my shows. I want them to be surprised and happy, but thoughtful as well.

Steve Cuden: In this book, which I think is just fantastic, it’s a lot of fun to read. And, of course, I’m reading it with a certain bias because I spent a long time out in Hollywood, and I worked in Hollywood a long time, so I understood a lot of what you were talking about and the references and where you were talking about and all those things. So I had that little bit of an insider’s understanding where someone outside. But I think anybody can really get into it and be quite entertained by this story. Now, I’m curious. In the story you’ve got this character. He can’t remember who he is or what he’s done. and he was a jerk. And he’s going, why was I. Why are people treating me this way? Because these people that he’s meeting for the first time, who he’s never met before, but he’s actually met them before. How did you figure out this is what, as I was reading it, I couldn’t quite understand how you figured out what he did know and what he did remember, which were little bits and pieces. And he certainly still had a facility for language. And how did you then determine what was gone from his memory? And then how did you build that back?

Paul Chitlik: Oh, my God. You make it sound so scientific, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t. here’s what happens. I was thinking, first of all, we know that people that have amnesia can still talk.

Steve Cuden: Sure.

Paul Chitlik: And they can still talk, so that it’s not complete amnesia. So they still have memory of something. They still know how to get dressed, and they still know how to walk, and they still know how to do a lot of things. So only a part of the brain is cordoned off and, not accessible. So I had this part of the brain, and the particular affliction I gave him is a temporary affliction, so he can regain parts of that brain bit by bit by bit. And I determine what bits those are. I put things in that would remind him of those bits sometimes. Like, you need a mnemonic to remember something. You write down. you write it down, maybe. Or maybe you tie a ribbon on your finger to remember something, whatever it is. Well, when he sees things, he starts to remember. Oh, yeah, I press the remote. I was just reaching for it. I have one right here. The remote for the garage door opener. That’ll open my garage door. Oh, look, I have a garage that’s filled with shit. I don’t know what that shit is. Now I have to go into the garage. I, go into the garage. I, open the door. Oh, I forgot about turning off the alarm. The alarm goes. Now I have to figure out the alarm. I can’t remember the code. And I turn around. Oh, there’s my ex wife. I didn’t know that’s my ex wife. I didn’t even know who that is until she starts talking. Buddy, what are you doing here? You know, so I gave him prompts to remember stuff, and I had people telling him stuff that he should remember. So I put him in a world that he has to discover for himself, but it also brings back memories. He starts to remember things. Oh, yeah, I did that. Oh, shit. I did that. That’s not good.

Steve Cuden: And you have the advantage of putting him into a world that he is actually from and familiar with. So his memory starts to come back slowly one way or another. If you had, given him amnesia and he was on a foreign trip somewhere and didn’t know where he was or who anybody else was, it would have been a totally different story.

Paul Chitlik: That’s the next book.

Steve Cuden: That’s the next book. So his name in the business is Buddy Ralston, but his real name is Cy Rabinowitz?

Paul Chitlik: Correct.

Steve Cuden: And so did you know. And, you don’t need to name any names, but did you know anyone in the business who was kind of like Buddy?

Paul Chitlik: Buddy is a compilation of several characters. Yes, I did know people like Buddy.

Steve Cuden: I’ve known people that were jerkwads like him.

Paul Chitlik: absolutely. Almost every character in the book is based on a real Life character. From that, even, Shereen is not so much saty. the tall yogi.

Steve Cuden: Yes.

Paul Chitlik: She’s based on, my yogi that I had in. In Los Angeles who was not a trans person. But, in the book, it turns out that she is.

Steve Cuden: She’s trans. Yeah.

Paul Chitlik: Which is a shocker. I, shouldn’t give it away now, but I did. Okay. maybe we’ll cut that.

Steve Cuden: You’ll still enjoy the book, get it and read it.

Paul Chitlik: Thank you. but, yes, I used them, as kind of templates, and then I could draw on whatever I wanted to draw on them.

Steve Cuden: So let’s talk about the building of characters, which I know you’re an expert at not only doing, but teaching. So, all right, you have all these people that you’ve met in your life, and you’ve decided to write a book about a business that you’ve spent a long, lot of time in. So you have already a lot of background knowledge. I’m assuming you didn’t have to do a ton of research about the business because you’d already had that research in reality. Okay, so now you decide you’re going to do a story about a guy who has amnesia, who has a. To begin with, he’s got two names, right? They’re very different from one another, and he’s beloved by the public and hated by the people he works with.

Paul Chitlik: Right?

Steve Cuden: So there’s two sides to the same thing. Right? You said a little Jekyll and Hyde. Not to go back that way for me, but it’s a little Jekyll and Hyde. All right, and so how do you then decide how to develop a character like that that, you know, you can work with throughout the course of an entire novel.

Paul Chitlik: I did something very different with this book. Usually I plot out everything that I write ahead of time, and I try to figure out what the story is and what the goals are and what the characters.

Steve Cuden: You’re the king of outlining.

Paul Chitlik: I’m, the king of outlining. And every student of mine will tell you that I make everybody outline this time. I thought, you know, I, woke up from a dream with the first sentence in my head, and I wrote that down. I said, this could be something. And then I thought, you know what? I’m just going to start writing from that. And I just started writing from that. And then I decided that I was going to write myself into a corner every day. And I did. I wrote myself into a corner, and I figured out, how to get out of that corner the next day. But I didn’t know where I was going for a very long time.

Steve Cuden: Do you think you could have done that in the beginning of your career?

Paul Chitlik: No, absolutely not.

Steve Cuden: It required you, having written thousands and thousands of pages of material that’s been produced, and people have seen and criticized and given you notes on for you to understand. You can sit down and just churn a story out.

Paul Chitlik: I wouldn’t call it churning a story out, typing, but I could write a story. The thing is, I have enough confidence in myself as a writer to know that if I work my character into a corner, I’ll be able to figure out how to get out of it the next day. And that’s what I did. And sometimes my characters would surprise me, as you know, once you know a character really well, character starts to talk to you.

Steve Cuden: So how did you know those characters? If you woke up from a dream and the first line was there, but you didn’t know what the story was, how did you determine who these characters were?

Paul Chitlik: Boy, that’s a good question. you know, I just wrote until I found those characters. They just came out.

Steve Cuden: So you didn’t sit down and do character studies or any of that? You just kept going?

Paul Chitlik: Just kept going. I started taking notes, though. Started taking notes. This character likes this. This character is from that. This character, his flaw is this, this character. What he really needs to find out is who he is. And what he really needs to find out is how to change his life for the better, because he’s been an asshole, and he doesn’t want to be an asshole. Everybody wants to be a better person. I think everybody in the world wants to be a better person than they are now. We just don’t know how to do that, and we don’t have permission to do that always. We just have to follow. We just follow what we’ve been taught to do, and we do what we need to do every day. we think we want to be better, but we don’t actually aim towards that. And so once I figured out that that was his goal, was to find out who he really was inside and to be that person, then it was more clear. I keep remembering something that I heard a long time ago from an inspirational, speaker. He said, with the boy I was when I was eight, be proud of the man I am today. And I thought to myself, you know, that’s a good thing to think about. would. My younger self was so idealistic at that time. Be proud of the person I was today. And what Buddy does in this book, Buddy Ralston, he realizes, because he kind of wakes up from his amnesia. He’s like a baby. He’s like a child. He has the opportunity to be whoever he wants to be. He asks himself, do I really want to be the person that everybody is telling me I was? That’s not a good person?

Steve Cuden: No. No. He comes off as a real louse until he figures it out.

Paul Chitlik: And so I figured that is the progression once I got that, and that didn’t take me that long to get to that point where I realized he wants to be a better person. And now he’s got to figure out how to do that. First he has to figure out who he was. Then he has to figure out who he wants to be. And then he has to try to.

Steve Cuden: Be that person and convince others of it.

Paul Chitlik: Correct?

Steve Cuden: Uh-huh. And I think one of the beauty parts of the book is by the end of it, it came out of the blue for me. I don’t know how others would read it, but the end of the book, I got emotional. I wasn’t expecting it because there’s this wonderful wrap up and Life story and Life lesson in it, and he learns and grows, and it’s really heartfelt. And I think that’s an achievement all by itself because most books do not do that to me. I don’t get emotional at the end of books.

Paul Chitlik: Thank you. I appreciate that. My goal in all writing is to evoke emotion, because what’s the point if you don’t?

Steve Cuden: Well, we’re in the passion business, aren’t we?

Paul Chitlik: Exactly. So if I don’t feel it, it’s not going to be in my writing. And if it’s not in my writing, it’s not going to be in the readers. And if I don’t do that, nobody’s going to read it. So I want to have as much emotion in my writing as I possibly can and as much emotion in my readers as I possibly can.

Steve Cuden: I want the listeners to understand something about what we talked about a moment ago, which is, it’s not easy to just sit down and churn a book out without having any kind of path to follow. That is an outline of some kind. I want to tell you what I’ve told many, many, many of my students, which is what you taught me, which was one of the most remarkable things about your ten week quarterly courses at UCLA, which blew my mind. We spent the first five or six weeks of all those ten week courses doing an outline, figuring out what the story. And you go, well, I’m not going to have any time to write a feature length screenplay. And yes, if you figure out the outline properly and you really have it detailed, well, writing the script is relatively easy by comparison.

Paul Chitlik: Much easier. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And so you did a whole novel without bothering to write the story down ahead of time, which I find fascinating because of who you are and what you teach. Again, you have to have been doing it for a long time to be able to get away with it.

Paul Chitlik: Well, let’s compare it to a sport. Let’s compare it to any sport you could think of. Let’s compare it to, say, baseball. You have to learn how to hit a ball.

Paul Chitlik: You have to learn how to throw a ball. But when you’re a major leaguer, you step up to the plate, you don’t think about hitting the ball. You don’t have to think about how you do that.

Steve Cuden: But the pros, even the most highly paid pros in any sport there is golf, football, baseball, it doesn’t matter. What do they all do? They all practice and they also all warm up and they all do those things. But you’re right that when they get into the zone to actually do what they need to do do, they’re not actually thinking about any mechanics, they’re just doing it.

Paul Chitlik: You’re exactly right. And I’ve done so much writing, I mean, it blows my mind when I think about what I did on real stories of the highway patrol. I wrote, sometimes I wrote 312 page scripts every day.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Paul Chitlik: Every day for the first several weeks I was working there. They were desperate for scripts. They, they, had to send them out that day. I would write them and they would send them out that day, and somebody would shoot them the next day.

Steve Cuden: Were they any good?

Paul Chitlik: No. Now, the first, the first 30 or 40 that I wrote were not good because, and they would complain to me, there’s too much here. I can’t do it. I can’t shoot it in one day. And I would say, okay, okay, I’ll go back and I’ll revise it. I’ll do this, I’ll do that. But by the end, first of all, I wasn’t writing as many as in a day as I was writing at the beginning. I was just writing about one or two a day. And it was pretty easy by that time. And I knew what, I was writing for was very specific. But that’s how it works. The more you do, the better you do it.

Steve Cuden: Well, there’s no question. The more practice. It’s like anything else. It’s a muscle. You just get more practice at it.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah. The 10,000 hours is really true.

Steve Cuden: Oh, it really is true.

Paul Chitlik: It really is true. So that applies to just about everything. And so I’ve written hundreds of scripts, and I’ve read thousands, literally thousands of scripts and worked on thousands of scripts with my students. So that, you know, it’s come second nature to me. I don’t, I can outline in my head almost. I, can tell you the seven points of any StoryBeat: In my head that I’ve seen, because I know how to do that.

Steve Cuden: Well, when you described in school this, I’ll go back to, more Paul Chitlik lessons for Steve. When you would describe in class the seven plot points, and you would just sit there and just rattle them off, I thought, how the heck does he know that? Now, of course, I can rattle them off because I worked at it a long time and I’ve taught it a long time, so I really understand what those plot points are and, but it’s true that there’s so much that you can do once you understand the structure of how it works.

Paul Chitlik: Exactly. Exactly. So that’s what I applied to the book, and then once I got into it, and then that’s the first draft. In the second draft, now I have notes. Now I know where it’s going. Now I know what. Oh, I can take that out. Oh, I have to put something in here. The revisions are, what really make the book. And so the rewrite, I rewrote it two or three times, I would say, plus several polishes, and that’s where the skill comes in.

Steve Cuden: And how much did it change between rewrites?

Paul Chitlik: I would say the first rewrite, I probably changed about 15%. second rewrite, maybe 5%. 3rd rewrite, maybe 2%. After that, it was punctuation and spelling.

Steve Cuden: Get any it so that it was good enough to be put out.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah. No, I never leave anything. I never send anything out that I haven’t proofread at least twice.

Steve Cuden: How important to the world is polishing?

Paul Chitlik: It’s very important because maybe you remember when I, talked about the Mercedes pass. Do you remember that?

Steve Cuden: I don’t think I remember that term.

Paul Chitlik: I m might not have used that term at that time. I’ve developed that term now. You walk into a Mercedes showroom, you see a Mercedes Benz 500, and it costs about $120,000. This car, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little less. It’s a beautiful car. There’s two of them on the, on the showroom floor. One has been scratched. the leather on the seats has been torn. The radio is installed upside down. The steering wheel is a little cacked. Maybe one of the tires is slashed. It’s brand new, but it had some problems, in the construction or maybe in the delivery. And it’s sitting next to the other one. That’s Perfect. There isn’t a scratch on it. They’re both asking for $120,000 each. Which one are you going to buy? You’re going to buy does not, doesn’t have to scratch, right? Of course, you don’t know what’s going on in the motor. You don’t know if the transmission is going to work on the other car because they were sloppy when they put that one together. Same thing applies to a script. If a script doesn’t look right, if it. If the spelling is off, if the punctuation is off, you don’t have confidence in reading the rest of the script. I have to tell you one story about one of my students in a graduate class, misspelled her own name on the top. And I said, miss Green, you have a problem here. And she said, what’s the problem? I said, look at the page. She goes, oh, oh. And I said, what do you think somebody that’s reading your script is going to think about you as a writer? And she got it. I mean, it makes sense. You’re paying about the same amount of money for a finished film script as you pay for that Mercedes. And people that are looking at it, they want it to be perfect right off the bat.

Steve Cuden: I’ve told students forever that, you know, if somebody’s a professional reader and they read many scripts, a week. And they are looking for not just great storytelling, but they’re looking for people that they think they can pass along, that others will want to work with. If you can’t be bothered to get your story right and get it polished and get it spelled right and so on, why should anyone be bothered to work with you?

Paul Chitlik: Exactly. Exactly. So it’s very important to polish your script, to read it over, read it over several times. And if you get bored by that, you’ve made a mistake. You’ve got to go back and read it and be happy about reading it and be excited about reading it and read it with a fresh eye as well.

Steve Cuden: It’s really important that you put stuff into the world that you feel confident in.

Paul Chitlik: Exactly.

Steve Cuden: Even if nobody else does. You need to feel confident in it.

Paul Chitlik: You need to not only feel confident, but happy with it. Happy about it. If you’re not happy reading it, if you don’t have tears reading it, if you don’t have laughter reading it, then you’ve made a mistake. You’ve got to go back and change it.

Steve Cuden: Are, those the things that you think that a publishing house demands that a writer give them when they turn a draft in, that it has all those elements in it?

Paul Chitlik: Absolutely. It’s got to have everything. It’s got to be ready. These days, it’s so hard to get something published by a publishing house. I mean, everybody can publish anything now themselves. To get a publishing house to read it. First of all, you have to go through an agent. To get an agent to read it takes, the same type of preparation. It’s very, very difficult to get an agent to read anything these days because they don’t want to invest all the hard time it takes to get something published unless it’s really, really ready.

Steve Cuden: You have to help them help you?

Paul Chitlik: Yes, you have to have the product already done. You can’t give them a half registered.

Steve Cuden: Product because they’re not going to bother with you. They don’t want to spend the time on you. They don’t have the time themselves because they’re trying to make a living.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah, it’s tough out there.

Steve Cuden: It’s extremely hard.

Paul Chitlik: It’s a bad time to be an agent.

Steve Cuden: I would say. It’s not a great time to be in the publishing business period right now.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah, it’s going through a revolution now. Amazon has changed the whole direction of publishing, and, publishing houses are just worried and they should be just like television. Television networks are worried and they should be, the top shows in television are not on the television network. They’re on the Street services. They’re on the, some of the cable, premium channels.

Steve Cuden: And the networks still have their hands tied behind their backs by the FCC and the various, regulations on them that the cable networks do not have.

Paul Chitlik: Right. They have that, and they also have, they have to be responsible to their advertisers. And streamers don’t have to worry about that. Or at least most streamers. Nowadays you’re getting ads on your streamer like we watch Hulu and we get ads on Hulu.

Steve Cuden: That’s right.

Paul Chitlik: Even though we’re paying $20 a month for it. it burns me, but, okay, we do it well.

Steve Cuden: It’s got shows you want to see and they know they have you captured that way. So they don’t really care about the audience at that point. They’re going to advertise to you one way or another. Even if it’s for products you have never bought and never will buy.

Paul Chitlik: Exactly. Well, I was watching something last night and I said, well, they don’t know their audience because I’m their audience for the show, and they’re, they’re pitching stuff for 18 year olds. 18 year olds are not watching this show. It was the swans. do you know the.

Steve Cuden: I, know what you’re talking about.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah, that’s not the actual title, but you know what I’m talking about. It’s not appealing to 20 year olds. They won’t, they won’t watch that.

Steve Cuden: So unless they’re super hip. So let’s talk about tv for a moment because you have a lot of tv experience.

Paul Chitlik: Sure.

Steve Cuden: What are the major differences between, when you’re writing on a straight drama, like real, stories of the highway patrol and working on brothers, which is a sitcom? Was brothers written in a room like a typical sitcom?

Paul Chitlik: Well, the typical sitcom is not actually written in a room. It’s talked about in the room. We talk about, you sometimes break the StoryBeat: In the room, and then one or two writers are assigned to go off and write it sometimes. and then they bring it back.

Steve Cuden: To the room, but then you beat it up in the room for days.

Paul Chitlik: Then they beat it up in the room again, and then they write it and, they rewrite it and they bring it back to the room and they beat it up again. And then they bring it to the table and they beat it up again. And then they bring it to the stage and they beat it up again. And, you know, it gets beat up constantly. Yeah, that’s tough. that’s one way to write something. When you write a drama, it doesn’t happen that way. you break the drama. Quite often on a series, you break the drama in the room with the other writers. you figure out what the outline is. It’s assigned to a writer. The writer comes back with the draft, they beat it up in the room again. but once they go to the stage, that’s about it. That’s about it. There’s no changes or there are very few changes. There’s a line change that maybe they had to move a, location. Maybe somebody fell and hurt themselves and can’t be in the scene. You don’t know. But those kind of things are accidental. when you’re making a sitcom that’s a three multi, camera sitcom, changes happen every day, and changes happen on the day of shooting. Changes happen during shooting. Changes happen after shooting. There’s always changes.

Steve Cuden: So on a sitcom, you’re probably going to get a pretty good table read that sends you back to do more work.

Paul Chitlik: Yes.

Steve Cuden: But on a drama, you’re not going to usually get that table read, are you?

Paul Chitlik: You generally don’t. No.

Steve Cuden: so are you able to tell, or were you able to tell when you were doing it out there, when you’re writing it, that this is going to work or not? Could you get a sense of that?

Paul Chitlik: Well, if you know the show really well and you know the characters, and you know not only the characters, you know what the actors are capable of doing, then yes, then you have a. Generally, you have a good idea. Also, your, executive producer and your rest of your writing team is going to tell you that’s not going to work for this show. Or, that character, neck can’t say that, or that character hates that kind of shit, even though it’s good not going to do it, so just forget about it. But once you get to the set, things happen. I did an episode of vip. Do you remember vip with Pamela?

Steve Cuden: I do. Pamela Anderson, yeah.

Paul Chitlik: I did an episode of that. I was a freelancer, but they asked me to produce it as well, which meant just hanging around the set and making sure everything went all right and, working on the dialogue, if there was a dialogue problem. And there was, there was some Italian in the script. And so people came up to me and said, I don’t know how to say this. What am I going to do with this? So I had to teach them some Italian to say the lines. And then Pam came up to me and said, look, I don’t think I can say this way? Is there another way I can say it? And I said, well, how about if you try this? And she said, oh, yeah, that’ll work. Or sometimes the actor will come to you and say, look, what if I say this, and this happened on the wedding dress? What if I say it this way? I, said, okay, well, tell me. And they would say it. And I would say, you know, you’re right. That’s better. Do that. Or, I don’t think that’s going to work in this scene. Maybe we could try it my way first and try it your way second, and we’ll see how it works in the editing room.

Steve Cuden: It is amazing how often the actors do, plus the work that you’ve written.

Paul Chitlik: Oh, they always improve the work that I’ve written just by their intonation. Not necessarily by any adding any new words, but by the way they deliver.

Steve Cuden: The words and the way they perform and look and how they react to things.

Paul Chitlik: I really learned this when I was on brothers because I wrote a script, with my partner, Jeremy Finch. and I always include him when, we’re talking about those kinds of things where the young daughter of the central character is talking about times, when her parents were arguing, when they were getting a divorce. And this never happened to me. It didn’t happen. My parents never divorced. They never argued very much. but I did have some of the toys she was talking about. And when she delivered the lines that I wrote for her and talked about the toys and talked about the arguing that her parents did brought a tear to my eye. She did it so well, it moved me. And then I buttoned it with a joke, and the joke landed so well, it just made us crack up. so do you still have that toy? She said, no, I sold it even without the big run up. You laughed at it because it’s so off, right after how important that toy was. Nice.

Steve Cuden: All comedy to me is always that counter to what you think is coming.

Paul Chitlik: The surprise.

Steve Cuden: The surprise. Like you said before, the surprise indeed. You’ve clearly not only received lots of notes in your career, but you’ve also given a lot of notes in your career as both a writer and also as a teacher. What would you say is the best way to handle notes?

Paul Chitlik: Well, there’s four kinds of notes. There’s the kind of note that you get from somebody that’s paying you, and there’s the kind of notes that you’re getting somebody that’s not paying you. So the ones that are not paying you, you listen to. And if you get the same note from two people, you have to think about it. If you get the same note from three people, then you have to make some changes. If you get the note from somebody that’s paying you, you have to either make the change if it works for your story or you have to say, you know, I tried to make that work, but I can’t. Do you have an idea on how I can make that work? Flip it over to them. That, funnily enough, brings me to story about notes, because I got a note once from a, sitcom executive producer who said, this sitcom, this episode is the best episode of this show ever. And I thought, oh, my God, that’s so great. And he’s saying it in front of the rest of his writers, and I’m a freelancer, but what they must feel now, I knew these other guys, and we walked out of it and said, yeah, yeah, don’t worry about it. Ah, I mean, he probably means it. It’s great. I thought, okay, fine. Didn’t go to my head. He said, can you write a sequel to this? And we said, oh, great. Okay, we got two freelance jobs on the same show. Fantastic. So we wrote the sequel, and he reads it, and we come in for notes and he says, guys, what made you think you were professional writers? And I thought to myself, what the fuck? and we walked out of there and we talked to the guys that we knew, and they said, it’s his game. Don’t let him play you. It’s his game. I said, okay, fine. I called up my agent and I said, he just gave us the weirdest notes. Go in and ask for more episodes. And she got three more episodes. So executive producers can play games for you, with you, but sometimes they give you notes that are very good. sometimes a studio executive will give you a note that will put you on the right track and help you out. But mostly they’ll just tell you what’s wrong with it and ask you to fix it, and then that’s up to you.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that it’s important to take notes whether you use them or not?

Paul Chitlik: Oh, yeah. You should always take notes in a note session. You should always take notes. You should always record them as well. Here’s another thing. Same executive producer that told me that was the best episode and what made me think I was a professional writer. I came in and he said, why did you change that line? And I said, because you told me to. He said, no, I would have never said that. I said, howard, I have it on tape. He said, I, don’t care if you have it on tape. I never said that. Okay, so you have to be ready to go with the flow. When you get notes from somebody that’s paying you, you have to know how to go with the flow. Sometimes you have to say, look, I’m afraid that’s going to change the tenor of this story. The character is probably not going to say something like that or do something like that. And they will react to that, and you’ll have to react to that reaction and decide what you’re going to do with it. And here’s the other danger of that, is that they can take it away from you. And that’s happened to me. You know, one script wasn’t because the people I was working with, it was the people above those people decided he wanted to make some changes, and he took it and he gave it to two other writers who fucked it up even worse. Then he fucked it up himself and then got in so much trouble that the original people that he, that he bought the script for decided they didn’t want to do it anymore.

Steve Cuden: And that, friends, is Hollywood.

Paul Chitlik: I got paid. Finally. I got paid and I got paid handsomely. But I would movie, never got made.

Steve Cuden: I have found that I’ve received, in my time, some seriously stupid notes. But I always take the notes because sometimes even the stupid notes trigger something else.

Paul Chitlik: Exactly. You know, the best notes are the ones that say, I don’t think that this would happen here, that maybe you need to do something different. Try this or this and see if it sparks something in your imagination that comes up with something better. And that’s the note that works.

Steve Cuden: The notes that always get me are, is, you know, just turn it into something else. Make it like something else, only better. And you go, what does that mean?

Paul Chitlik: Oh, I’ve gotten the note. Make it funnier.

Steve Cuden: Make it funnier.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah, make it funnier. I can do that. Okay, sure. Or, make it better. Yeah, make it better is a good note. Or I once had a note, my first note. This is my first note session, actually. This was with guilty or innocent. The executive producer had never produced a show himself, had never written anything. He just knew how to sell things. And he sold this idea to, a, ah, distributor, and it was distributed and it did okay for the first 65 episodes, 13 weeks. It was a strip show, meaning it went every day in, syndication. And he said, when I turned in the pilot, he said, this scene, it just lays there I said, okay, what do you mean by that? He said, I don’t know. You’re the writer. He just lays there. And I thought, okay, if he had any fucking idea how to give a note, he would have said, there’s no conflict in this scene. That’s why it’s not doing anything. That’s why it’s just laying there. But he didn’t know how to do that because he didn’t know anything about writing. Most executives know something about giving notes. The good ones know how to tell you this doesn’t work. They don’t necessarily know how to tell you how to fix it. And they, and the good ones don’t tell you how to fix it. They say, you have to fix it because this and that and the other.

Steve Cuden: Thing, well, the really good ones, can pinpoint what the issue is, and they can express the issue to you whether they can solve the issue or not. It’s another story. You have to solve it. But they can at least narrow it down to, hey, this line makes no sense because of this, this, and this or this action doesn’t make any sense, or we don’t understand this or whatever that might be. and they can at least narrow the issue down.

Paul Chitlik: Exactly. Exactly. They can point out the problem, not necessarily the solution.

Steve Cuden: Right. Well, I’ve been having just so much fun for the last hour or so chatting with my good friend and my former professor at UCLA, Paul Chitlik, and we’re going to wind the show down a little bit right now. And I’m just wondering, in all of your experiences, are you able to give us a really solid piece of advice or a tip that goes beyond what you’ve already given us throughout the show, which is tons of information and advice, but something that you like to tell those who are just starting out, or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to that next level.

Paul Chitlik: Well, there’s two things I would tell them. the first thing is to read as many screenplays. Ah. Or as many novels, depending what you want to write. Read a lot of those. Read the ones that you really like, ask people what they like, and read those suggestions as well. The more you read, the better off you have a sea of knowledge to draw from. The other thing I tell people is to make a short film. Make a short, TikTok, make a short anything, and get it on the net and see if it works. See if anybody wants to see it. Then make another one. Then make another one. Then make another one. Then make another one. Make it longer, make it longer, make it longer. And the more you make, the more you’ll do. The more you’ll do better. And the more you’ll understand what’s working and what doesn’t work. As we said, we started off talking about practice. The more you practice, the more you’ll be better. The better you’ll be. The better you’ll write, the better you’ll understand what goes on. The less you’ll have to make notes on, the less you’ll have to write down on your, development. The less you’ll have to outlined. The more you read, the more you know, the more you write, the better you’re going to be. I think I’m a better writer now than I was five years ago, certainly Better Than I was 30 years ago when I was winning awards. I think I’m better now, and, I’m writing stuff now that I think. I think it’s going to do better as well, and it’s going to have more of an effect on people.

Steve Cuden: Well, I think that’s like any and all forms of exercise. The more that you do it, the better you get at it. If you’re going to want to work your muscles, you have to go to the gym and work your muscles, you.

Paul Chitlik: Got to do it.

Steve Cuden: And that’s what you’re talking about. We’ve talked about that a couple of times in the show, which I think is very important and truly sound, solid advice for anyone who’s thinking about having a profession or a career in this Crazy industry that we’ve been in for all these years.

Paul Chitlik: Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Steve Cuden: Well, Paul Chitlik, I’ve just had so much fun chatting with you, and for those of you that are really intrigued by what we’ve been talking about, go out and get lies, all lies, Paul’s new novel, which is just fantastic to read and also by rewrite, because rewrite is really, it’s a nice short. It’s not a real long book, but it is so powerful as to what it’s telling you in terms of your work that it gives you all of the right ways to look at what you do with your work once you have at least a first draft. And that’s where you need to get to as a first draft in order to actually make art.

Paul Chitlik: Thank you, Steve, for this opportunity, and it’s so great to talk to you again. I always enjoy talking to you, and I see the Jekyll and Hyde thing in the background, and I reminded that you were very instrumental in getting stuff on the stage. That’s a great achievement. And, I appreciate your taking the time to talk with me.

Steve Cuden: Well, Paul, it’s been fantastic. I truly appreciate your time, your energy, your wisdom, and just, you know, chatting with you as well. Always a joy. Thank you.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat. If you liked 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, iHeartrade, radio, tunein, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.