Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat…

Steven Sears: What is a successful writer? I always describe it as like when you’re sitting there with your fingers on the keyboard, you’re looking at the screen, you’re in that world, the voices are in your head. It’s playing out and, and you got that stupid grin on your face. You know you’re in the zone.

Yep, I’ve already won. 

Announcer: This is Story Beat 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, Steven L. Sears, began his career as an actor. He moved on to become a writer, story editor, producer and creator in tv, film, digital media, and animation. He’s worked on such TV series as Riptide, Hardcastle, and McCormick, the A Team, stingray Walker, Texas Ranger, the Highway Man, Hollywood Detective Grand Slam, Jesse Hawks, Superboy, she Spies, and other popular favorites.

He produced Swamp Thing for the USA Network. Raven for CBS Co-executive produced Xena Warrior Princess. Co-created and executive produced Sheena and has had many pilot and development deals with various major studios. Steve’s animation work includes Itsy Bitsy, spider Transformers, rescue Bots, and the short film, the Gift of the Huo with legendary director Don Bluth.

His prose work includes the non-user friendly guide for aspiring TV writers, the graphic novel Stagg X with Kevin J. Anderson stories in such anthologies as Jeff Sturgeon’s last cities of Earth and alien versus Predators Ultimate Prey. Steve recently published the Short Story Collection Tales of the Aboveground Underground, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

If you like offbeat stories with a wonderful twist to rival those of the Twilight Zone, I highly urge you to get Steve’s book. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s a truly great privilege for me to have Steven L. Sears as my guest on Story Beat today. Steve, welcome to the show. Thank you. 

Steven Sears: Thank you very much, especially for that intro, which I wanna somehow get onto a t-shirt.

That was awesome. So we can arrange that. It’s gonna be a long T-shirt, which is like still befuddling to me that I’ve got all that. Those credit. I 

Steve Cuden: know I have the same problem. You look back in your credits and you go, did 

Steven Sears: did I 

Steve Cuden: do all that? I know, but you did. It is the weirdest thing I. It is. So let’s go back in time just a little bit.

When did you first become interested in this thing called show business? When did you first think about it? Wow, 

Steven Sears: okay. Um, when did I first think about it? Seriously? Or just aside from the, oh, I wanna be an astronaut one. 

Steve Cuden: Well, it’s, it’s, uh, you’re, you’re probably a kid and you’re watching TV or movies or something like that, and you’re going, you know what?

That looks kind of cool. I might wanna try that. Was it that far back? 

Steven Sears: Um, it, no, it goes back quite a ways. What it was for me was, it was a progression of myself. Now I’m a military brat, so every three years you move to another state or another country and you had to reinvent yourself. So I was funny, you know, I was a kind of the comic person.

I had different masks that I could wear to get to know people. But when I was in, um, I think I was 13 years old, I. We had retired at that point to a small town in Florida, St. Augustine, Florida. 

Steve Cuden: Right. 

Steven Sears: And the State Play of Florida was performed there every summer. Uh, it was called Cross and Sword, and it was performed at the amphitheater and it was a, you know, summer theater.

And so, I don’t know how I became aware of this, but one of the roles was for like a 10 to 13-year-old kid. So I went and I auditioned for it. I read the Gettysburg Address ’cause that’s the only thing I have memorized at the time. But I think more of the fact that I could actually reach the back row of seats is why they hired me.

And it was a, you know, it was a small role, just a few lines. And, you know, I was, throughout the play. I really loved it though. I had a lot of fun doing it. So that kind of like got my interest in being in front of people and performing characters. That wet your appetite? It did. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was like I had been doing it all my life because of, you know, moving, like I said, you reinvent yourself and you become kind of a character.

And so I was kinda like, wow, this is great. So when I started, uh, high school. I got involved with the drama department. I got involved with music. I was in the band, I was the drum major at one point. I did almost every theater production. So naturally when I graduated high school, I went to college to try to get a degree in medicine.

I. That was the logical medicine. In medicine. It was pre-med and that’s because my father, when he retired, um, he became an administrator for a health organization and they built hospitals and I spent a lot of my time hanging around the hospitals. And I like science, I like medicine. I. Now you cannot become a doctor if you have a C in chemistry.

So, no. So my chemistry 1 0 1 knocked me into liberal arts very quickly and I was really trying to figure out what I wanted to do. See, once again, you’re hearing the long version of this. I’m actually shortening it up now. There was a movie that had come out at that time, this was in the late seventies and it was called The Goodbye Girl and that star Richard Dreyfus.

Indeed. Now people were coming up to me and they were saying, you should see this movie ’cause he’s playing you. Oh. Which I thought kind of weird. It’s not like, oh, he’s playing something you could play, he’s playing you. So I saw it and yeah, there were a lot of similarities and, and I thought, well, that was interesting.

Okay, so later on he won an Academy Award. He won the Oscar for that role, and I was kind of bemused by the idea that somebody would win an Oscar by playing me. So I’m literally walking toward the student union at that time. That was at the University of Florida. And I was thinking on this, just kind of amused by it, and he won the Academy Award, but I thought to myself, well, yeah, but only special people win those things.

And then literally I stopped, this was a Kodak moment in my mind. I stopped and I thought, oh my God. If he had felt that way, he never would’ve gotten close to that award. And then I went, I’m gonna be an actor. That’s what I want to be. I love doing that. And so I, I called my dad and told him, your son’s not gonna be a doctor.

He’s going to be an actor, but someday you’re gonna be a script doctor. That’s true. Good way of putting it. Thank you. Script surgeon. But my parents, my parents were, were incredible. They were great. My dad, his response to me was, you’ve always loved it. Go and do it. So I moved to um, Florida State University, which is unfortunately in the news right now.

I moved to Florida State University and got their degree in theater. It was the top theater school. Then after that, I came out here to be an actor by out here, Los Angeles. Right. That was my focus. That was my introduction to showbiz, and I realized that that was my home. That was just where I felt the best.

So did you land parts? Oh, we did a few small things. I mean like literally tiny things. A couple of commercials where I was just background noise. My first national appearance with a line was in 1981, I believe, and I moved out to Los Angeles in 1980 and it was on general hospital. On the soap opera and the line was, it was just one line, two words.

It hurts. That’s all it was. Now they got me my after card. Well, I already had my after card. They got me my SAG card, and it also taught me a lot about camera framing, because when I was saying it hurts, I was holding my, my arm, which was in my lap. I was in a wheelchair. When I saw it later on, I realized you couldn’t see what I was holding in my lap.

So it looked like I was grabbing my groin and saying it hurts. Perfect. And Dr. Leslie, I guess said, well, it’s broken. We’ll take you to x-ray. That was amusing. 

Steve Cuden: Nice to know your crotch was broken. Exactly. 

Steven Sears: I thought, you know, wow. I got national exposure for that. But the thing was is that during this time, this leads into.

Where I am now. During this time, I was, I’m fascinated with people. I’m fascinated with the business, and I’m one of these people that doesn’t promote myself immediately. If I meet like somebody in the business, I don’t immediately say, how are you gonna hire me? I’m really curious about what they do. So I was meeting casting directors and I was curious about what they were looking for as far as what their jobs were.

You know, how, what’s your day to day? And a lot of those walls started to drop. They got to know me as me. It doesn’t mean they were hiring me, but they were comfortable with me. Right. And one of the things I learned from them is that they were tired of seeing people come in with the same material for auditions.

It was like, you know, Neil Simon was very big back then. So people would come in and they said, you know, God, we can mouth the words along with them. We wanna see original material. So I thought, oh, okay, well I’ll write my own stuff. So I started writing little three page scenes for auditions, and I was at a school at the time, an acting school called Devo Vaughn.

Some of the people there obviously were at different schools. I found out some of my scenes were now being used at other schools where they were using them in scenes study. Then I did a showcase one night where there were seven scenes being presented. I only knew the scene I was doing with my partner.

I didn’t know who else was doing whatever. And you had written it? I had written, I’d written that one. When I showed up and saw what else was being done, five of the seven scenes were written by me. So there was a casting director there who asked me if I was the one who had written all those, and I said, yes.

And she said, well, you should think about being a writer. And I said, no, no, that’s a lot of type. It’s no, I’m, that’s takes, I’m not a writer. I’m not a writer says the eventual professional writer. And I actually still say it today. So what happened was that night I pulled out a script from a TV show and I looked through it and very naively, I thought, well, it’s a bunch of three page scenes except there’s an arc and there’s a structure and there’s threads and there’s characters.

And so I thought I would write a script for the fun of it. And it was horrible. I will admit it was horrible, but man, it was so much fun. Mm-hmm. Because I was, every character, I was the director, I, everything, I played the movie in my head as I wrote this. Now as I’m doing this, I’m also working at a restaurant actor.

Figure it out. Yes, of course. I was a waiter. Of course it’s, it’s an entry level position. 

Steve Cuden: You can ask any waiter in Los Angeles, how’s your second act coming? 

Steven Sears: Exactly. Or go to a Starbucks and count the number of laptops. You’ll know the exact percentage of writers in the room. Exactly. So anyway, I met a friend there, a guy named Bert Pearl, and he and I became best friends and Bert and I decided we were gonna start analyzing scripts for the fun of it.

That’s it. I also thought as an actor, it would make me a better actor if I understood what the process was. Of course. So we started doing this. As a part of this, I also started calling production houses and asking them if they had writer’s, guides, some shows, had writer’s guides, some didn’t. Um, and I was also told, don’t ever call a production company.

They’ll just hang up on you. I, of course, being a bit naive and stupid was like, well, what harm can that do me? I’ll call. Anyway, so I called over to Steven j Cannel Productions because they were producing a new series called Riptide. 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Sears: And I got this woman on the phone and asked her if they had a writer’s guide.

She said, we don’t, because she said, did you see the show? And I said, oh, I saw the pilot. I love it. And she goes, oh, great. And then we started talking about Florida. We were, we just started talking about casual stuff, is, again, I’m curious about people. So she had relatives in Florida. I was from there. We talked and talked and talked, but she said, um, have you and your friend written any scripts?

And I said, yeah, we’ve written maybe four just for the fun of it. These are, these are spec TV scripts. Spec TV scripts. Right. Okay. One was a Simon and Simon. One was a Magnum pi. So she said, well, you know, the producers always look for new writers, so if you have an agent, send them over. Now we got off the phone, I didn’t get her name, she didn’t get my name, but I had met this agent and I told him this story and he said, oh sure, I’ll send a couple of your scripts over in about a month, we got a call from Tom Blomquist, who was the producer of Riptide.

And he said, why don’t you come on in, meet me and the exec producer. So we went in and we met with him and the exec producer was Babs Kowski. And we just had this great time just chatting and talking about things. And eventually they asked, do you have any ideas for Riptide and bird? And I planned to write one for the heck of it.

So we had like five ideas. In any event, over the course of two meetings, they selected one of the ideas and they asked us to write a story. 

Steve Cuden: Wow. 

Steven Sears: So when we wrote up the story, we went back to meet them. We watched them rip it apart and put it back together again. And it was the most wonderful thing we could have experienced because these people.

They were professionals. They allowed us to be a part of the process. It wasn’t like we were excluded. We were in there jumping in and talking about different things. At the end of that meeting, Tom turned to me and he said, I need the name of your agent for business affairs. Believe it or not. Up until that moment, I had no idea what was going on.

I literally looked at him in shock and I said, did we get an assignment? And he goes, yeah, you got the assignment two weeks ago now Bird, and I had no idea. We didn’t even know whether or not you got paid for this. We didn’t, and we were trying to figure out how much we’d be paid, and we guessed it would be like $500 because we had to split it, but it was $15,000 for an episode of television at that time.

Mm-hmm. So he and I wrote the first draft, turned it in. And we got a call from, it’s on my, I actually, I actually still have the tape. It’s a, it’s a old tape recording, uh, message machine. Tom called on a Monday and he said he had read the script. He really liked it and he’d given our names over to the A team and Hardcastle McCormick in case they were looking for writers.

And I was like, well, what is going on here? And then on a Wednesday I was sleeping on the floor with my then girlfriend, ’cause I could not afford a mattress at that time. I’d left the restaurant. I was making $130 a month putting ads in the front of shopping carts. And the story money we got, I put that directly into savings immediately.

So she called that morning and I answered the phone and I was asleep. And so I’m like, hello? And she says, hi Steve, this is Babs. And I go, oh, hey Babs. And she goes, well, she goes, I gave your script to Stephen j Cannell, the guy who owned the company and created all these shows. Oh yeah. And she said he only had one note.

For the entire first draft. 

Steve Cuden: Wow. 

Steven Sears: So she said, we were wondering whether you guys just want to come over here, get an office and work with us full time. Wow. And my response to it was, oh, okay. And she said, literally, she remembers this to this day. She said, you’re asleep, aren’t you? And I went, I just woke up.

And she goes, when you realize what I just said, call me back. And she hung up. She’s wicked. 

Steve Cuden: So in all your years in Hollywood, how many people have you heard, has that ever happened to Nobody. Nobody. It, that’s exactly right. 

Steven Sears: Yeah. And, and everybody has a different entree into this. What Bird and I went through was exactly the steps that are textbook.

You write the material, you get the meeting, you sell the idea, you write the first draft, you are on staff, except they rarely come in that order. Oh, rarely and rarely that quickly. Well, I was gonna say the time between, I wrote that first horrible, horrible script to the time that I was standing in an office trying to figure out what the heck to do with this office.

Was about one year. It only took, and that is, that is seriously, I mean, this sounds like it’s bragging. It’s not because I’m still mystified by it. That’s the closest to an overnight success that I’ve ever heard. ’cause I had no intention of being a writer. That’s pretty close. It only 

Steve Cuden: took me 13 years 

Steven Sears: neophyte.

Nothing. Nothing to it. 

Steve Cuden: Nothing to it. But mine was accidental. That’s the thing. And it was so weird. Well, clearly you demonstrated something that they really liked and that then held you in good stead. So what you, you didn’t get any training really? You trained yourself. Yeah. No, I’ve 

Steven Sears: never, I’ve, I’ve said this at, at lectures, because I find this to be amusing.

The only book I’ve ever read. On writing for television is the one that I wrote, and the only classes I’ve ever taken in it are ones that I now lecture. It’s true everything was geared toward acting, but I didn’t realize that at the core, I was not a writer. I was not an actor. What I was was a storyteller.

All creatives are storytellers. That’s what I was from when I was a kid trying to blend in with the new school. I was a storyteller. When I got up there to play that role. I was a storyteller. Everybody working in a creative effort. Everybody on the set and in the office, they are storytellers. The guys pulling the cable on the set, they’re actually storytellers because they’re trying to make this grand story work.

And I realized that’s what I was finding the correct venue for it. That was the magic. 

Steve Cuden: Well, I think the listeners should pay close attention to what has happened here. It’s rare. Don’t think because Steve had this relatively easy entree in that everyone does. Most people do not. But the most important lesson here is that if you’re really studying the work that you want to do, and you are even vaguely talented at it, you need to work at it.

Mm-hmm. And maybe you will get fortunate enough to meet someone like you did. Well, 

Steven Sears: and, and it’s true. And I use my story as a, I just posted something about this a little while back where somebody had asked a question about screenwriting, and I did this long screen about it, but I, at the end of it, I, I told people how I broke in, in a much shorter paragraph than I just did right then.

But I, I mentioned that I started from nothing. I had no training as a writer. I never intended to be a writer. It took me two years of the imposter phenomenon before I decided that I was a writer, or at least they’re paying me for it. Did you think you were a good writer at that point, or just a writer? I can’t judge that.

I’m a writer who loves to write, and it is like asking the question of what is a successful writer? I always describe it as like when you’re sitting there with your fingers on the keyboard, you’re looking at the screen, you’re in that world, the voices are in your head. It’s playing out and, and you got that stupid grin on your face, you know, you’re in the zone.

Yep, I’ve already won. But then if you look over your shoulder and you notice all these other people are watching what you’re doing. That is the next step. And I don’t know how to 

Steve Cuden: define that. I assume it’s the same thing for eventually becoming a producer. Well, of course the credits are a whole issue in itself.

Eventually an executive producer. But you didn’t go to school for that either. You learned that on the job? I learned it on 

Steven Sears: the job. And I will tell you that I was so incredibly fortunate that I started out, uh, both Bird and I started out at Stephen j. Candle Productions. No kidding. Steve was a writer, a wonderful human being.

A great guy. He was known for starting people’s careers. 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I 

Steven Sears: remember the first week that Bird and I checked into our office and literally we couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to do with our assistant. We’re like, can we make her coffee? What are we supposed to do? But Tom Blomquist, the producer I mentioned, he came into, uh, to the office, we were chatting and I told him, I said, you know, we don’t know what we’re doing.

And he said, well, welcome to grad school, except we’re gonna pay you to learn. And that was Steve’s philosophy. You had to be involved. You weren’t a writer who stayed in your office. The first week we were in the editing bay, we were watching the screenings. We were in the casting sessions. His logic was eventually he wanted you to become a successful producer that would benefit him.

But also there was a little kid inside of Steve who’s just, he was like giddy with excitement when he saw people who had passion. 

Steve Cuden: And there are others like him. But that’s kind of rare, isn’t it? Yeah, it is. Unfortunately. That’s why I was so lucky. So I’m curious, do you think that your starting out as an actor impacted your ability to write?

Oh, absolutely. 

Steven Sears: I was a storyteller. I just didn’t know that I could actually use my fingers to type it out on a keyboard and control all of the elements. So I’ve had this conversation with a few people who ended up, uh, in other aspects of the industry. They may have come out here as an actor, but they ended up in a technical side or whatever.

But we’ve talked about our commonalities. And what we learned in theater or in our storytelling time definitely came in to play as we explored our other areas. I’ll give you a, a great example, which I anticipate you’re gonna nod your head wildly on this one, is one thing that actors are required to take as a part of their training is improvisation.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Sears: So improvisation is, you get up there with maybe 2, 3, 4, 5 people, they give you a scenario and then they say, go. And immediately without a discussion, you have to create a character. All of you have to somehow create a conflict and you have to create a resolution within this and have all of your characters unique and participatory in this particular scene.

Improvisation. Okay. Welcome to one day of television. Yeah. That happens every freaking day. When I go in and pitch a story, and it’s one thing I miss about the pre zoomo and the pre COVID generation. I used to love going into into office meetings. You go into an office and what do you do? Well, you’ve gotta pitch something.

Yeah. But you gonna just lecture them. You’re gonna perform it. You’re going to improv it because you gotta read the room. You gotta know when they’re leaning back and how to pull them back forward. Soon as I walk into a room, I start reading the room. I look around and I say, this is somebody’s office.

It’s their place away from home. Which means they brought things from their home to make it more familiar. Where are those tchotchkes? What can I learn about this person? 

Steve Cuden: Hmm. 

Steven Sears: And then the theater training I had taught me how to feel the emotional mood of your audience. And that’s a hard one for people who have not done theater to understand it is you literally can be out on stage and you can feel it.

It’s, it’s an energy. And you play it. So all that was from acting, but 

Steve Cuden: I’m telling a story. But part of that, correct me if I’m wrong, is you have to be comfortable with what you’re gonna present in the first place. You can’t be all up in your head worried about what you’re gonna say. Yeah. In order to relax in and figure out what, how to read the room.

Is that 

Steven Sears: correct? Yeah, absolutely true. There’s a whole psychology of it. And the biggest impediment to it is yourself. And this overall, just in creativity in general. You feel like you’re okay. I’m in their environment. I’m, I’m the fish out of water. I’m out of place. I don’t know exactly how to, what am I gonna say?

Am I gonna offend them? Am I gonna No, you just embrace it. You, you reach back into yourself and you say, here’s the passion. Mm-hmm. Go with that. 

Steve Cuden: So I’m curious you, I know that you have a phenomenal sense of humor and that you are very witty and charming and can be very funny. But you wound up writing hour long dramas.

Mostly that’s what you’re known for. How did you get to hour long dramas instead of winding up in the sitcom world? 

Steven Sears: I have a lot of people who have asked me that when they find out I’m a writer, they assume that I’m writing sitcoms or something. ‘

Steve Cuden: cause you’re funny. 

Steven Sears: I, you know, I, okay. I don’t know. I rarely listen to myself anyway.

But I think part of that is a lot of the stuff that I have written, um, has been adventure. Mm-hmm. Detective Adventure. Absolutely. But you’re correct. I have run the gamut. I have written drama. I have written comedic things. I have written animation, I’ve written adventure, I’ve written sci-fi fantasy. I’ve run the gamut.

I’m very, very fortunate that I’m able to cross over genres. But there is a reason for that. It’s not as just like, oh, snap. But every time I write, I write real people in my mind and characters. If you believe in the characters and the audience believes in your characters, the background doesn’t matter as much.

They’re following those characters. So one of my observations about. Life is that. Life is has got a lot of built in comedy to it. If we took the time to look, and I don’t mean knock, knock jokes, I don’t mean laugh out comedy, mostly it’s that ironic observation of our own lives. So what is that? What is an ironic observation of your life?

It’s actually a shift in perspective. You’re taking for granted what’s happening to you. You fall into the same tropes of, oh, wo and pity me. But then one day you start to chuckle because you realize, wow, if I look at it this way, that’s what creativity is. That’s storytelling. If I just wrote a slice of life, that was the mundane slice of life, that’s not interesting.

It’s always that shift in perspective. And if I can make my audience adopt that shift in perspective, then they’re gonna do the same thing I did. They might chuckle or they might go, oh my gosh, I didn’t think about that. Or. You know, so, but as far as the comedy thing, I think where that comes from with me, why I am like that, as one of my friends said, I tend to look at the world as if I’m walking backwards.

So when you’re looking forward, everything in front of you is exactly what you expect and you walk forward. The moment you turn around and look where you just came from, you go, oh, I didn’t see that. Oh, that was there. Oh, that was interesting. You’ve shifted perspective. So I’m very good at shifting perspective.

Which, by the way, makes me intolerable when I have a debate with somebody. ’cause I can become devil’s advocate real easy. 

Steve Cuden: Well, I think that that’s a really interesting way to put it. I’ve never heard anybody say it quite that way. And I, I thank you for saying it because it’s a really interesting way to think about looking at the world as you’ve passed by it.

That, by the way, is similar to a lesson that Howard Suber, the great professor at UCLA used to teach, which is that if you’re gonna understand how a story works, it’s like going down a Whitewater Rapids River. You’re gonna go down it the first time and it’s all gonna zoom by you very fast. And you’re, you might pick up the general gist of things, but you’re not gonna pick up any details You need to watch the movie.

Or go down that river a second and third and fourth time to actually start to see how it works and what the details are. Yeah. And what you’re saying is sim something similar in that you’re looking at it in hindsight? Yeah, 

Steven Sears: absolutely. And there’s so much truth to that because so much of what we experience is, I’m going to use the word experiential ’cause it is, we’re experiencing it, but we’re not analyzing it.

We’re not trying to dissect it. And to be honest, we don’t wanna go too far with that. But what we wanna do is say, wait a minute, how did that affect me and why did it affect me? And why is it I want to go back and relive that knowing full well, I can never have the exact same experience because the first experience was so unique.

Absolutely. But as a storyteller, can I pass that 

Steve Cuden: on to someone else? Hmm. Well the audience doesn’t need to care about any of that. It’s really the creators that need to care about that. Exactly. Yeah. Oh God, you know, full well how much we have to go through. Just to put one second on the top. Yeah, absolutely.

And, and frankly, I think the right attitude toward it is that the audience should never have to care about it ever. They should just be entertained and take something away from it one way or another. 

Steven Sears: Yeah. And for those, I, I did a, a talk just recently about this, um, in character development. And this will illustrate it for anybody out there who isn’t.

Quite clear on what this is, what we’re referring to. As I said, I’m, I am known for writing characters. I’m known, you know, actors so far seem to love the characters that I write, so I’m, I’m very good at that. Now, I use this example when I talk to new students and they’re developing characters. I say, if you pick your best friend, the person you know the most, you’ve known them since you were a child, you know everything about them.

I can guarantee you, you only know 20% of who they are, if that. However, for that 20% to make sense, you have to know there was an 80% that existed. So when I create my characters, I have to know that 80%, not necessarily in detail, but I have to know that 80%, but that 80% will never end up on the screen, except it will affect every bit of what you see.

That’s what we have to go through as creators. 

Steve Cuden: Is that what you go through to develop your characters? Do you actually sit down and write out character bios and that kind of thing? It’s a good question. I, 

Steven Sears: I, since nobody taught me that I was supposed to do that, the way I do that is it’s trial and error.

I play with my characters. I write so much about my characters in scenes before they even hit the actual page. So I will, I, you know, I tell people if I’m writing a pilot, I’ll write 30 to 40 pages of that pilot. Then I trash it all and start over again because I. I’m meeting these characters for the first time.

So you’re learning about the characters by going through a draft? Absolutely. Yeah. And as, as I go through it, I learn little things more about them. I include that and I, it’s just like a brand new friendship. 

Steve Cuden: Do you literally throw the whole thing out or do you just use pits and pieces? 

Steven Sears: Well, yeah. Yeah.

Let me clarify that. When I say throw things out, never. There is no set rule for these things people. It’s when I say I throw things out, no. What happens is that I realize I have to start from square one if some of what I already developed works from that point on. Absolutely. I always refer to it as I put it in the filing cabinet.

So I can pull it if I need it, but I, I don’t feel, I don’t adhere to it. I don’t say, oh my gosh, I already wrote this, so I already have it. That’s a lazy writer. 

Steve Cuden: You are obviously well known for having worked on Xena with a former wonderful guest on the show, RJ Stewart, who, who produced that show. Oh gee.

And you also are known for co-creating Sheena. Those are two powerful, strong female characters. Clearly you are not female. And so how does a writer get into the mindset of writing a powerful character of a different gender? Mm-hmm. That has to be the, the protagonist of the show. 

Steven Sears: Uh, one of the things I was known for early on was, and again, I didn’t recognize this because I didn’t know the terminologies.

I refer to it this day as I was known for writing outside of my skin. 

Steve Cuden: Mm. 

Steven Sears: So writing outside of, I. My look, my culture, my race, my gender, uh, my orientation. Now, it wasn’t like I was trying to do that, but I was able to do it. What I tell people, and, and this is the truth, is that when I start to write a character, which is outside of my skin, the first thing I do is I remind myself I am not that character.

I have not lived that life. I have not seen the world through those eyes. Now, what that tells me is I have to work 5, 6, 7 times harder to try to get this right. As I’ve also mentioned, I, I, I’m, I’m a research hound, so I just definitely go into research. But the most important thing about this, which has helped me, as I said earlier on, I’m fascinated with people.

I just love listening to people talk about their experiences and their lives, and I listen, I want to hear these things. I’ve always been attracted to underdog stories and in our culture, especially historical underdog stories that deals a lot with disenfranchised people. Groups that have been pushed out of the groups that were ignored.

I’m fascinated by them and, and the experiences they’ve had, the successes and the achievements despite the opposition. So I’m attracted to those particular characters, but at the same time, the biggest thing that I do is I remind myself, you gotta work really hard at this, and you have to make sure you accept the outside voices of people who have lived those experiences.

Steve Cuden: Do you think your writing helps you understand or make sense of our world, which then helps the audience make sense of the world you’re creating? It’s funny 

Steven Sears: because for me, writing and creating is basically putting a bunch of question marks in front of me. Saying, I’ve got to dive into these question marks.

It’s always kind of a back and forth reciprocal thing, but with everything I write, every character I create, the magic words as you know. This is the phrase What if so, the what if actually goes right to the core of characters. For example, what if this, this, this, this, this. There’s the question mark for me, if I’m going to approach this character, am I approaching it from a stereotypical viewpoint?

And if I do that, what if I avoid that? What if this, but you phrase it a little more succinctly than I have ’cause I’ve had a hard time actually talking about that. For me, it is a back and forth. One reason I know I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I feel, I still feel like I’m a kid in a sandbox, just having the time of his life.

I gotcha. Yeah. And it’s because of that, there’s all these question marks and they 

Steve Cuden: have to be answered. I have to plow through them. That may have come out of your acting, training, whatever training you had, whatever you did. Mm-hmm. Because the, in acting there is a famous phrase called the magic what if.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that obviously is related because you’re writing for actors. Yeah. And, 

Steven Sears: and the, and the what if, by the way, is the shift in perspective, going back to that again, 

Steve Cuden: what if. So let’s carry on with what if, but talk about the book that you’ve just published, tales from Aboveground Underground.

Tell the listeners what the book is about. I know you’ve got, uh, I don’t know, I didn’t count the number, but there’s seven or eight stories in the book. Short stories. Yeah. They’re all wonderful to read. They’re all full of life and energy. What do you look at the book and think that this is what it’s about?

Well, the best way I can 

Steven Sears: illustrate that, um, it is a book of short stories. They do have, the majority of them have like twists or shifts of perspective. It’s, I like to put them there. It’s, you know, you’re not expecting it or maybe you are, but then I dance with the left or the right. Mm-hmm. When I finished this book, and this was a group of short stories that I’ve just been putting together as I’ve been working on other novels, and I do have like three novels I’m working on.

However, that is also like the waiter in your favorite restaurant saying, oh yes, I’m up for the next Spielberg movie. Okay, guess I’m working on these things until they’re published and out in the world, they’re not real. There you go. So with these short stories, every now and then just a notion will pop into my head with the magic What if, and I will just start writing it out.

So this was kind of a collection of those and I wanted to go ahead and publish them because why not? I had them and it was weird because mostly I’m writing a collection of my stories. Whereas unless you’re an established author that seems like kind of vain, like, I’m sorry, you are not an established author until then you contribute to anthologies, which is, I had also been doing that.

But to illustrate the, the question you asked, I struggled to come up with a title and cover art because my stories are really disjointed. They are a little disjointed. There’s yeah, there’s not one thing that you can look at for the entire thing, but you do have a whiff of 

Steve Cuden: death in almost all of them.

Really? God, I didn’t even notice that. Yes, 

Steven Sears: there’s zombies. Wow. I like that. But I mean, there’s romance, there’s comedy, there’s zombies, there’s sci-fi, there’s time stories in the 

Steve Cuden: book, you finally get to your unproduced screenplay of Harry Oell. Mm-hmm. And what does he do? He chases after demons from Hell yeah.

Steven Sears: Harry Oell, the detective from Hell. And that was a, uh, that was the pilot off of a screenplay that I’d written. Is that not a whiff of death? Of course. What, what have we learned about Steve today? He’s a killer, so, yeah. I, I had to agonize over, over what, you know, at one point I was trying to come up with a cover that had like a gallery of different ideas and everything, and eventually it was a combination.

The, the title, the Aboveground Underground was actually a title that I had for a school newspaper back in seventh grade. Literally a one sheet mimeograph. Wow. And I called it The Aboveground Underground. I just thought it was cool. So I thought, what the heck? It’s a call back to my childhood. I put that on there.

But yeah, I don’t know how I could describe it. It’s, it is an eclectic group of stories. As long as they still work for people, that’s really what counts. 

Steve Cuden: It’s a true anthology. It’s not about one thing or another. Yeah. And did you write them all at one time or did they they stories you wrote over a long period of time.

I had been collecting them 

Steven Sears: as stories. Gosh, probably for like four years, something like that. ’cause I was working on other projects, so this was kind of like a little respite. And then it was just one day I looked at the stories I had and, and my wife, who’s an author, Jessica Bronner, she said, you know, you could put together a collection.

And of course I dismissed that immediately, but she kept saying, no, you could do this. And I went, well no publisher’s going to accept this. And she goes, well, you do know about self-publishing. And I went, yeah. And she goes, well, why not? You’re not looking to make millions of dollars off of this. Why not for the experience?

I would, 

Steve Cuden: and by the way, as a self-published author, your book can last forever without being winding up on the remainder table at the bookstore. That is a true thing. Yes. You do have a little bit more of that particular control, which I appreciate quite a bit. You most certainly do. So it took you about four years.

Were these just stories that just came to you? Were they bolts out of the blue, or did you sit down and think, I’m gonna write a short story today. Okay. This goes back 

Steven Sears: to the core of where do you get your ideas. I’m sure you’ve never been asked that before. 

Steve Cuden: Oh, I, I have been asked that before. 

Steven Sears: Yeah. And so my reaction to it is this.

When people ask me, where do you get your stories? I, I literally am a bit amazed at that because I go, I can’t stop them. I can’t shut it off. Literally, I can’t. I’m one of those people I understand. I’m not gonna say I’m clinically A DHD, but boy, I’ve had a lot of people make that observation, including people who are authorities in that realm.

But again, I can’t shut it off. So everything is a story. This right now is a potential element of a story. It goes into that filing cabinet. It used to be that if I was. Like when I was writing, uh, scripts and everything, if I was with somebody, my first wife, for example, a wonderful person, but she always kept a notepad in her purse because we could be watching a movie in a theater, and I would stop and I would say, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.

I just write down something and hand it back to her. These days I do it by texting myself and I have this long list of text ideas for stories. So when I have the time and I’m just kind of playing with one of them, I just start to write little aspects of it. And then again, you’re swallowed by the zone and suddenly you are writing out this story.

One of ’em is based on actually meeting my wife. That was the one called coming out and, you know, it mentions their meeting at a convention. The, uh, there was another one in there, which was the love story, the Bumble Bean. 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Sears: And I had written that one originally. Actually, my wife used to publish anthology.

She did a thing called Story the Month Club. And every month they would feature a story and then at the end of the year they would publish all the stories. And she asked me to submit one for the, uh, February, which was Valentine’s Day. So I came up with this concept of what I thought would be. An ultimate love story for a particular person.

I don’t wanna give away too much, but that was just strictly a love story. The elements in it were like, okay, but what I was focusing in was on this love story and the twists or anything else that comes out of it was actually me trying to secure the love story in the process. How can I justify this? So 

Steve Cuden: do the twists also just come to you as well, or do you actually work at trying to figure out the twists?

Steven Sears: Sometimes they come to me early. Other times I’m just, I’m in the sandbox playing. And then it’s that again, it’s that phrase, what if, what if you did this? Wow, why would anybody do that? And that’s reason enough. 

Steve Cuden: So when you start to work on a story or a script or whatever you’re working on, or a book, a novel, what do you tend to think of first?

Plot, character, action. What do you think of first? Typically, you know, I sound like I’m all over the place. There are different, no, no, Steve, you sound like a writer. 

Steven Sears: Well played. Well played my friend. Sometimes it will just be a character that I wanna play with and I say, what’s, what’s the most interesting situation?

I can put that character. Sometimes it will just be a visual, you know, it’s kind of like the best artwork I’ve seen is the one that kind of makes you lean back and go, what am I looking at? And I think about that and I think, how can I get to that? 

Steve Cuden: But, but is that a picture in your mind’s eye of some activity or action?

Sometimes. Or is it a, a character? 

Steven Sears: Um, sometimes it is an image of action. Other times it’s a character that I have enabled inside of myself. Mm-hmm. Yes. People, I do walk around the house in different characters. It’s part of my writing process. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t, who would do that? I don’t know.

But use the Harry Oell thing as an example. Um, Harry Oell was based on a screenplay that I wrote, and it was mm-hmm. After like two years of working on TV shows, we had a strike and I finally had a chance to write a screenplay. So I thought I would do this. And that entire screenplay came from a conversation I was having with my, my writing partner back then, Burt Pearl, I can’t remember the conversation, but whatever it was, he turned to me and he said, yeah, like when hell freezes over.

And I said, huh. When hell freezes over, everybody will owe everybody something. And then that part of me went, wait a minute, that’s true. And what if hell froze over? And that percolated the entire screenplay with that screenplay. I was meeting with one of the executives at CBS and they told us that they did long form pilots, two hour pilots as opposed to one.

And they said, do you have an example of your long form work? And I only had that screenplay. And so I left it behind. Later on that week, the executive at Columbia called me and he said, so I, I’m curious about that. Harel fell screenplay. Does, does anybody own that? And I said, well, I do. He goes, so you haven’t sold it?

And I went, no. And he goes, oh. And I went, okay, there’s something going on. You wanna fill me in? And the executive’s named Jeff Klein, he’s a absolutely incredible person. We became friends. He said, look, I gotta be honest with you, um, CBS wants to turn that into a series. Wow. But, but we don’t own the rights.

And he goes, honestly, you can go to any studio in town. You already have a deal. We’re just hoping you’ll stay with us. Wow. And I told him, I said, because you were honest with me. Absolutely. And so that ended up being the pilot script that I wrote for them. They paid for it. It was written out, Jeff Gansky was the, um, president of CBS studios, and apparently it came down between my pilot and another show, and they decided to go with the other show, which was fine.

So the rights returned to me, revision of Rights, the original screenplay, I think that might’ve been sold or like two or three times since then. So, but that was just for the fun of it. 

Steve Cuden: So you, you, and this happens to any number of writers you have capitalized on a single story multiple times. Sure. Yeah.

Steven Sears: And in this particular case, like I said, Harry Oell, which is the same character in the screenplay, just a different type of circumstance, was in the pilot. And then the pilot episode ended up in the, the, um, collection of tales. And one of the novels that I’m writing right now is actually the screenplay version.

I. Of Harry Oell. So I’m following that story. The, the feature length version. The feature length 

Steve Cuden: version. There are slight differences in there because what you published in Tales from the Aboveground Underground is the pilot, right. Obviously in the book it’s in screenplay form. Right. But it’s not full length pages in your book.

So that’s what I’m gonna guess. 60, 65 pages. Yeah. About 60, 

Steven Sears: yeah. 60, 65 pages, yeah. Mm-hmm. For an hour. And it’s only in the print version of the book if somebody orders a Kindle. And the reason for that is, is you turn a, um, a deficit into a positive exclusive. Only in the print version you can get Harry O fail the pilot, when in fact it’s like, and the formatting for Kindle sucks.

So we’re not gonna bother with that. It 

Steve Cuden: just comes it all up, doesn’t it? 

Steven Sears: So, 

Steve Cuden: what lessons would you say that you learned? What big lessons have you learned from people like Stephen Canne? I mean, you’ve already told us a little bit, but I’m talking about production lessons from Stephen Cannell or RJ Stewart, or any of the folks that you’ve worked with.

The first thing, there are so many 

Steven Sears: people involved with production. 

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Sears: And every one of them deserves your absolute respect. As I said, I refer to everybody as storytellers. Everybody on that set is a storyteller. Everybody in the office is a storyteller. I’m a storyteller. They’re worthy of the same respect that I demand.

The second thing, and I, I’m really inspired by upcoming independent filmmakers because of this, is I didn’t realize the importance back then of learning everything that you don’t do. As I said, Steve Kall had us in the editing room, had us in casting. He wanted us to learn everything. Didn’t mean we had to be experts at it, but we understood it.

And the more you understand about the entire process. If you are a writer, take an improv class. If you are an actor, take a class in editing, take a class in directing, write something. Everybody should write something. The more you learn about how the process is put together, the more valuable you are to a production company.

I’m not gonna fire somebody that I don’t, you know, if I have to explain all the process every time, that person is not as useful to me. But if I say this, this, and that, and they get it immediately, they say, we’ll take care of it. No problem. It means this. I get to go home on the weekends. You have made my life easier.

Bless you. I will. I will allow you to work on every show that I work on, and eventually, hopefully you’ll hire me. So yeah, learn everything you can about all the other processes and independent filmmakers these days, they’re having to do that. It’s like the old person’s gonna speak right now. I don’t think you understand how lucky you are by that.

It seems like a task, but boy, when I was a kid, I wish we had that. I mean, my first films were like super eight cameras when I was 10 years old, so. Mm-hmm. 

Steve Cuden: Of course. So, let’s talk for half a moment about pitching. You’ve already said that you loved going into the room Yeah. To pitch. Explain what the secret for you is of pitching.

Is it being very well memorized or being loosely memorized? What secrets can you share about pitching? 

Steven Sears: Okay. I can give you some mechanical things and I can talk overall about it without going on too long. First and foremost, you’re gonna know your material. If you have the passion for it, you know you’re gonna go in there.

You have to read the room. You have to know how to shift gears really quickly. Also, keep in mind that sometimes somebody in the room might say, well, what about this? And it’s not something you want to do, but if you say, I. Huh, that’s interesting. You’ll get to the next step, and once you’re in production, you can try to change it back if you want to.

I tell people that when you are pitching and people are trying to offer input in the room, your reactions. Should always be of the following. Oh, that’s interesting. Wow, I didn’t think about that. That’s a great idea. You know, I gotta give that more thought. Wow, that opens up possibilities. Everything is a forward movement of positivity.

Now what you’ve done by that is you’ve shown these people that not only are you physically embracing their input, you are project oriented. You’re not person oriented, you’re not ego oriented, you’re project oriented. So when I go into pitch, I keep that attitude in mind and things still shift in my head.

Now, on a mechanical level, there are two things. Um, one deals with the elevator pitch, which everybody hears about, and the other one deals with actually being in the room. And the most difficult thing about being in that room elevator pitch, this is a bit of homework for everybody. So if you know what an elevator pitch is, the idea concept is you end up in a elevator with an Alister or somebody who can get your movie made, and you only have until the next floor to pitch it.

So. Boom. You have to pitch it immediately. First thing I wanna tell you is never do that. If you’re in an elevator with somebody who’s an Alister, don’t do it. And I’m serious about that. You think that’s your big opportunity. You are so much better off being polite and respectful. ’cause people do remember that, but they definitely remember the a-hole who bothered them in the elevator.

Steve Cuden: Mm-hmm. 

Steven Sears: But the point being is that you have to know how to quickly do this. So if you have an idea, let’s say for a series or a movie, get one of your close friends. Go to a restaurant lunch, sit down, tell them you’re gonna, I’m gonna pitch you something. Don’t tell ’em anything else. I’m gonna pitch you something.

Sit down there. The uh, waiter comes over and asks for your drink order. Give the drink order The moment the waiter walks away, start your pitch. Now you’re trying to get through this pitch, but you can see that waiter. So you know you have to get done before those drinks come to the table. So you are watching, you’re playing your time, you’re going through the pitch.

Waiter comes by, you are done with your pitch. Here’s the important part. Then turn to your friend and say, now pitch that back to me, because that way you’ll hear what they heard, not what you were pitching, but what they heard. You’ve gotta put yourself in the other person’s place and you have to be able to understand that what you are saying, the passion you have fills in blanks that they’re not aware of, but you wanna see if they got it and do this a few times and you’ll start to hone that quick pitch.

The next thing deals within the, in the pitch, when you are invited to go into a pitch, into an office, again, it, it kind of works with the zoom, but the office is always better. If you do go into one office, the first thing that’s gonna happen, you’ll be sitting there waiting to go in. They’re gonna offer you some water.

Accept the water, don’t drink it. Take a sip of it. Last thing you wanna do is be in the middle of a pitch session and have that little tingling down in your bladder. Start your pitch after the little chitchat. There’ll always be chitchat. Hey, how are you? Oh, da da, da da. And eventually somebody will say, so, what do you got?

Start into your pitch. Now, a lot of people believe the most difficult part of a pitch is coming up with that opening. I don’t look at it that way. I think the openings are great. That’s performance. And we could go into detail about that, which we don’t have time for. Whether it’s a genesis opening or it’s a, uh, realization opening different things.

However, the most difficult thing about your pitch is when to shut up. That’s the hardest thing. And the reason for it is because when you’re done with your pitch, there’s generally silence. And we hate silence. Mm-hmm. So immediately that little animal inside of us, the little protean, that evolutionary model, it starts saying, oh my God, there’s silence.

I failed. Fill in the silence. And so you’re sitting there saying, and then Timmy walks in and finds the dog in the closet. Silence. ’cause the dog was, the dog got home before he got there. And that’s why, you know, and so when Timmy got, he didn’t know he was, he was, you know, and you’re trying to fill in that silence.

Okay, here’s the trick. That water that I told you, it’s right there on the desk in front of you or the coffee table when you finish that final line, and then Timmy opened the closet and there was the dog. You pick up that water and you start to drink and you don’t stop until they say something. What you’ve done is you’ve shifted the oppression of silence onto them.

You’re occupied. And it makes sense why you just finished the pitch. I’m gonna take a drink now. They’re the ones who feel like they have to speak 

Steve Cuden: and this actually works. Do you know that that is a trained technique and tactic in sales? Uh, I did find that out. Yes. That’s a sales technique. You make your pitch.

Also in psychology. Also in psychology. You, you make your statement and then you shut up and now the onus is on the other side. Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Steven Sears: And when you use that water technique, it excuses you completely. Bum. I’m out of this ’cause I Very interesting. I’ve 

Steve Cuden: never heard anybody say to drink the water at that point.

Yeah. I think that’s a really fabulous lesson for people to pay attention to because that tells you it’s a good dividing line. It’s where you can break 

Steven Sears: and it’s a very mechanical thing and sometimes people feel like they have to force themselves to do it, but the the truth is no, just pick up the water and drink.

Watch the magic happen. It 

Steve Cuden: will happen. And frequently you’re not going to make that sale. Right. But it helps to have them contribute to your story. Absolutely. Because you want to get back into that office in the future. And that’s all it is. It’s a, all it is is you’re going in with the hope of getting more pitches.

Oh, yeah. And I, I will tell you, 

Steven Sears: I, I’m good at pitching. That’s, I don’t pat myself on the back too often, but, uh, because I love doing it. Now have I sold every show I’ve pitched? Absolutely not. But I’ve won almost every pitch I’ve done. 

Steve Cuden: Well, you’ve made friends one way or another with every pitch you’ve given.

Steven Sears: Yeah. 

Steve Cuden: And therefore you’ll get that invite back. 

Steven Sears: Right. I have the open door and I tell people that sometimes that door will swing open wide, and you’ll be surprised. Oh my God, I’m actually now on the inside, which is what happened when I broke in. Right. Or that door is open and they say, but you know what, we’re gonna leave the door open for you ’cause you’re an interesting person.

Steve Cuden: We want you back sometime, and ultimately it’s a numbers game. The more times you get in there, the more likely you, you have a chance of selling something. That is true. If you don’t get in there, then we know what that chance is. I wanna quickly ask you about collaborators. You have had actual collaborators in your life, and as well, you’ve been forced through the nature of production to collaborate with lots of other people for one reason or another.

Mm-hmm. What, in your opinion, is the secret, the trick, the technique, the way to make collaborations work? Uh, a 

Steven Sears: lot of it is getting over the pride and ego. Everybody brings it. I am project oriented, so when I’m working with other people, if it’s a, if I’m co-writing something with somebody or if it’s in a writer’s room again, first thing I do is I say, okay, I’m not the biggest voice in here.

I give absolute respect to the other people who are there. And I give respect to their ideas and their contributions. Quite honestly, I try to learn from everybody I work with. One of the things about my partner Bert, way back then, I was really good at plot structure. I was really good at these little twists and little quirky personalities.

Bert was really good with deep character. And remember, I, I was then known for writing deep characters because I paid attention to what Bert was doing. And he was really good at this. And I learned from him. And I, I like to think he learned something from me, aside from making little origami birds or something like that.

But we learned from each other and we were also best friends at the time, so that, you know, that helped out. So every time I’m working with somebody. I try not to get, you know, get all full of Steve. I try to say, Hey, I am just as much learning about this as you are. And so there are two revelations with that.

One, I realize that this person is gonna try to make it better and my name’s gonna be on it as well. But secondly, it also means, but I also have value and that value needs to be respected. So I have worked with difficult people. I have worked with some people where we started out trying to write something together and it just was not going to work.

And we remained friends, even though we abandoned the project. I have worked under extremely difficult people and I’ve had people say, would you work with them At the end? I go, absolutely, I would. ’cause I understand them and I understand my own value. So with collaborations, there’s a lot of give and take back and forth, but the way you can kind of encompass a successful collaboration is if you’re in a writer’s room and there’s something that comes up and people start getting into a creative argument.

And they go back and forth about this and this creative argument is like, oh, da da. Sometimes it can get a little personal, sometimes, well, yeah, well you would think that because da da da da da da. And then suddenly somebody goes, wait, wait, wait. Um, oh cool, it’s lunch. You guys wanna head out. Where do you wanna go?

And you just go out and have lunch. Then you come back and you go, okay, where did we leave off? And you realize you’re not gonna pick up into the argument you’re gonna say, okay, so we were trying to solve this. So yeah, and I, I think everybody who’s had a successful writer’s room has had that experience.

You have to kind of like the people on 

Steve Cuden: some 

Steven Sears: level. 

Steve Cuden: At some point you’re gonna work with people who, uh, are not on your wavelength or maybe multiple people who aren’t on your wavelength. And then the key is whether or not you are capable of figuring out their wavelength and maybe getting on theirs versus trying to force them onto yours.

And 

Steven Sears: part of that goes into trying to put your perspective into their head. Mm-hmm. I, when I get notes from people, I. How do I handle input from people? The first thing I do is assume they’re right. That’s true. If I hear somebody give me a note, whether it’s an executive or a fellow creative. Fortunately, many of the executives I worked for were incredibly creative.

But the first thing I do is I assume they’re right. And the reason I do that is because if they’re right, they’re gonna make the project better and save me a lot of work. If they’re wrong, I will have at least gone through the process that brought them to that opinion so I can understand it and then we can find a way to resolve it.

Steve Cuden: How often do you get notes? And the note is clearly not right for the moment that they’re talking about, which is gonna be a frequent thing that happens. Mm-hmm. But it actually triggers another thought for you that actually improves things. Yeah. Does that happen frequently? 

Steven Sears: Yep. Every time something like that happens, and, and that is true with me, I, I have, I embrace even the notes I don’t agree with, especially when you’re working for a network or you’re working for a studio and they say, well, you gotta put this in.

I am not somebody who believes, okay, I’m gonna plop it into the scene. I literally say, if I’m gonna do that. What can I take advantage of? Because now there’s a ripple effect. Oh my goodness, I have to put this in here, but does that mean that he did this because of this? And if he did that, then that plays, and literally, I might even do an entire rewrite of the script to try to accommodate one simple note.

Mm-hmm. Another rule we used to have in the writer’s room, um, at least I’ve had on mine, is that any stupid idea is welcome. Throw it out on the table. Literally. And this happened in Zena quite a bit actually, with rj, we would throw out the most bizarre, stupid ideas on the table and we would laugh at the person and say, oh my God, that’s ridiculous.

I can’t believe that. And then suddenly somebody would say, but you know, if we did. And then we’re off to the races 

Steve Cuden: again. I love the creative process. That’s that just sort of just Jimmy’s every lock on the door. Yeah. And you try and figure out something from what came up. Uh, I have been having one of the most wonderful, fun conversations I’ve had in a long time.

Thank you. With Steve Sears. And we’re gonna wind the show down a little bit right now. And clearly you have worked with lots of different characters, not only on screen, but in real life. And I’m wondering if in all of your experiences, you can share with us a story that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat strange, or just plain funny.

You know, it, 

Steven Sears: I would say, yeah, I’ve got 40 years of those stories because every day is a quirky, outrageous, bizarre, weird type of thing. And I’m trying to think if I can isolate. I mean there, there are little quirky things that have happened. I remember going down to the A team set one time I. And t uh, Mr.

T was standing outside of his trailer and he was wearing like this bright colored robe, and he had like his little coffee and his bling, and he had like a goofy hat with the ears on it. And I was just, this was back before all of our phones had cameras, and I was like, God, I wish I had had that photo.

That would be so awesome. But yeah, there’s, there’s just, I try to single out one particular thing, but, but let me tell you, uh, this, because this will explain a lot about me as well. Now, when I was a kid and I loved television, there were a few characters that I played every time I’d go out in the yard and play these characters.

One of ’em, of course was Captain Kirk had to go out there with Captain Kirk. The other one was from a series called The Time Tunnel. I remember the Time Tunnel. The Time Tunnel was about, you know, it was a time tunnel that these two scientists go into. And every episode they were in a different part of time while the crew back here was trying to bring them back into the contemporary time.

And Jimmy Darin. Played the role of the somewhat rash young scientist named Tony. So whenever we played Time Tunnel, I was always Tony because I was like, yeah, I’m like that young, brash, and you know, I’m like 10 years old, 12 years old, whatever. So, but I was always Tony. All right, so Paige is off the calendar and we’re doing this episode of 18, and Jimmy has become a director.

In fact, this is, I think one of the first things he ever directed was this episode. And so at that time I was engaged to my first wife and I was at her place. And it was a Sunday before we started shooting. And I’m on the phone with Jimmy talking about some details, changes in the script and stuff like that.

And so we’re chatting, we’re chatting and chatting, and then I say, okay, well I’ll get those pages out and I’ll see you, uh, see you tomorrow. And he goes, okay. And I hang up and my then fiance, she says to me, who is that? And I said, oh, that was. Oh my God. That was Tony. Holy crap. That was where that little kid had been pounding at the back of my head saying, do you realize what you’re doing?

Do you realize where you are? And I’ve gone through that a couple of times where I’m like talking to somebody on a business level and I realize you were like, when I was growing up, you were my, I, I’m re say my hero. ’cause my heroes really were my parents. But you had such an influence on me. And, um, you remember I’ve told you the story about, uh, Richard Dreyfuss about when I broke in.

Mm-hmm. You know, Richard Dreyfus was the one that he won that Academy Award for playing me. I finally had a chance to meet him at a Comic-Con. And I told my friend, I said, let’s walk by where he is signing. If he’s a jerk, I don’t want to mess with him, but you know. And I walked by and he seemed like he was very nice.

He was chatting with fans. So I said, all right, I’m gonna stand in line and get his autograph. And I had like a copy of the Goodbye girl. I was gonna get him to sign that. So I went up there and got him to sign it. And as we were chatting, I told him, I said, by the way, I said, I actually work in the industry.

And I gave him a few of my credits, including Zena. And he was very complimentary about Zena. He just said, that’s, that’s a great show. It’s changed a lot of lies. And I was like, thank you very much. And then I told him that story about how I realized that. I had said that only special people win that Academy Award.

But if he had ever thought that way, he would’ve never gotten near it. And he just glanced at me. He says, never occurred to me that I couldn’t. And I just smiled. And I said, that’s the point. That’s the point. So, you know, when I think about those quirky, weird, strange things, it’s those ones that just hit me right in the chest and say, Steve, do you realize the life you have been able to lead?

Steve Cuden: Oh, I understand that big time. It’s like you look back and you go, how did this happen? Yeah, yeah. But there it is. Yeah. Go figure. I’m still trying to figure out what I wanna do with my life. Well, you and me both. That’s why we’re sitting here having a chat. So, last question for you today, Steve, dun, dun, dun.

You’ve already given us a huge amount of wonderful advice throughout the whole show, but I’m wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice or a tip that you like to give to those who are just starting out, or maybe they’re in a little bit trying to get to that next level. 

Steven Sears: Absolutely. There’s a lot of advice I could give you.

’cause as anybody who’s been in this industry for a long time, you begin to realize that all the technical aspects are things you can learn in class or you can learn in books. But at the end of the day. The hardest thing is staying in the business. And a lot of that is really your philosophy about it, how you regard the business, how you regard yourself.

But I kinda look at it this way, and this is again, expressing myself and I, if you’ve heard, if, if you’re like listening to the podcast and you’ve heard me talk before, you’ve heard me say this because it’s very important and, and I express it this way, when little children are born and this has got a bit of spirituality into it, not necessarily that I’m agreeing with it, but it has it in there.

You could say that the child just came from the universe and that child, that child is, has, knows everything. It just came from the universe, but we don’t understand it. It’s so knowledgeable and so in this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don’t understand that. So what we have to do is we have to teach it a language.

Now, the moment we start teaching the language, we’re actually putting a little bit of a structure around what it can express. We’re using words to do that. And then what is the one word that they hear the most often? No. No. Now it’s meant to be protective. No, don’t do that. You’ll burn yourself. No, don’t do that.

It’s cold outside. But after a while becomes, no, don’t wear that. It’s embarrassing. No, don’t say that. You know, you’ll, you’ll make us look bad. No, da da. And what happens with every no is that a wall gets built around that child and pretty soon without realizing it, you’re trying to fight the walls that you built yourself.

You’ve gotta let that child go. You gotta let that child kick down those walls and play again. The whole reason we love doing this is because it’s like a child in a big sandbox. We can build anything we want if we allow the child to do it. A child can solve so many problems if they’re given the freedom to do it.

But what do we do with those walls? So the thing I tell people is I’d never be afraid of that inner child. Never be embarrassed by that inner child. Let that child run free, kick down those walls and have fun. And especially if you’re a writer. You put it down on your, on your keyboard, on your screen, on paper, even if nobody sees it, that little child had one hell of a time exploring those avenues and those possibilities.

Steve Cuden: I think that is just wonderful because how many adults have lost their childhood? 

Steven Sears: Yeah. 

Steve Cuden: The, the feelings of being a child and as a writer, as a person in show business, I think it’s really important that that be found again if it’s gone or maintained, if it’s still there. And I think that’s really fantastic advice.

Thank you. I, I, yeah. I appreciate that. Steve Sears, this has been an absolutely spectacular, believe it or not, hour and 15 minutes. Oh my God. On StoryBeat today. And I, I cannot thank you enough for your time, your energy, and your great wisdom. Thank you so much.

Steven Sears: Thank you for having me here. This was, uh, this was a lot of fun. I liked this.

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 are listening to. Your support helps us bring more great story beat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tune in and many others.

Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden. And may all your stories be unforgettable.