From GoodFellas to Breaking Bad with Stephen Molton

This podcast was taken from our vault.  If you are interested in studying Television Writing with Steve our next class is Feb 3rd-March 3rd; you can sign up here. From GoodFellas to Breaking Bad with Stephen Molton Jake: Today on the podcast, I have a special guest, Steve Molton. Steve is a mentor here at Jacob Krueger Studio, and he’s also just an extraordinarily amazing human being and writer. He’s a Bloomsbury Press Pulitzer Prize Nominee, he’s a former HBO and Showtime executive, he just did a movie with Frank Pugliese, and he’s a general badass. Today we’re going to be talking about not just how cool Steve is, but also about TV Drama. We’re living in a golden age of television, and Steve comes with vast experience. He teaches our TV Writing Class that’s coming up February 3rd,  as well as our ProTrack Mentorship program.   So, Steve, I’d love for you to start by talking a little bit about how is it different today than it was a few years ago. Where are the opportunities now? Steve: That’s a great question. As you know, we’re in yet another golden age. I guess we could probably describe it as a third golden age, because there was the initial one in the ’50s, and then in the ’70s and ’80s, cable transformed everything. And then, there were suddenly a thousand different platforms, and that has given rise to an immense number of shows at any given moment. It has also given rise to web series, to the short form, which we hadn’t seen before. And that opens up a vista for writers, of a kind that no other form of writing does at this point, partly because the appetite is amazingly large for all these companies. Everybody wants to brand themselves, and the most secure way to brand themselves is to create their own series. There has never been more opportunity for original voices as right now. Jake: Yeah, it’s very exciting. Writing feature-length drama is much different than writing television drama. Steve: There’s the rub!  That’s the fascination. And you and I have had experience in both worlds. I always like to position this process as who is the writer in society at this point? And one of the fascinating things, if we go back to our old Greek or Roman heritage, is that we discover pretty quickly this very intimate relationship between the law in a democratic society and the storytellers. And that all began, as you know, you're sitting there smiling because you know all too well, it began with something that the Greek called the Agon. When the Greeks, 2,500 years ago, they were trying to train people in the system of jurisprudence, they’d bring all these people down to Athens once a year, and they’d talk to them about how you serve in a jury, and what the law was, and why this was a cornerstone of the free society, etc. But then, at night, they’d put on tragedies. And what we now know as, sort of, the origin of sitcoms. Strangely enough, we don’t think of sitcoms as being 2,500 years old, but they were!  They are. In the middle of the dramas and tragedies-- there are about 22 of them left to us for us to look at-- but in the middle of each of these dramas there was something called the Agon, which was really like intermission where the people who had come down to learn about their judicial system would debate the kinds of issues that had been raised in the drama itself. And it was out of the Agon that the idea of the protagonist and the antagonist were born. What we often assume is that the protagonist is inherently the good guy. But the reality, all the way back to the Greeks, as it wasn’t really the good person. It was the moral contestant. It was the person who was sort of caught in between. One of the best evocations of that in older literature is Hamlet.  This guy is a moral mess. He’s back and forth between this choice and that choice, and to be or not to be, and yadda yadda. But if you flash forward to somebody like Henry Hill in GoodFellas-- and Henry is a guy I actually encountered in meetings at Showtime, if you can believe, when he was in the Witness Protection Program-- Henry Hill, despite the fact that the normal world for GoodFellas is a skeevy, funky, deadly world, Henry Hill is ultimately the one that’s just a little bit better than the rest of them. And that’s why Scorsese drives the whole film with Henry’s voice-over because he’s the moral contestant. He isn't quite exactly sure if he is who he thinks he is, and of course, his identity is completely flushed into the open by the end of the movie. So, I always try to encourage my students not to think in terms of these strict boundaries of good and evil, but to realize we’re in a protracted journey with the protagonist. And that, of course, takes us to: what’s the difference between movies and TV? You and I have talked a lot about this. The primary difference between movies and TV for me is that a movie is about a character who changes, and television is about a character who procrastinates. Jake: [Laughs]. Steve: A movie is a journey, a movie is a product, a movie is all built on an outcome, and it’s driven mainly by imagery and the relationship of character to action, because what we’re really dealing with is rates of change-- and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. A series is really about a world, it’s about a habitat. It isn't really about a product or an outcome. It’s about a world in which characters wrestle with these moral quandaries. I always try to help students look upon their world as this kind of moral arena. And we have all kinds of postmodern ideas about the word “moral,” but when you get right down to it, all the way back to the Greeks, and right up to today, we are storytelling creatures. We’re constantly wrestling, We’re constantly looking at stories and thinking about stories, and reading them, and watching them. And the reason is that we’re protagonists in our own moral universe, right? Jake: Everybody is wrestling with trying to do the best they can in some way. Steve: Yeah, exactly, and trying to sort out the options: “Well, what if I did that?”In our own minds, we’re always projecting, “What if I made that choice?” The great thing about films and television is it’s full of people who are making the kinds of choices that we wouldn’t necessarily want to make!  But we get to see the repercussions, right? It’s a safe way to experience our own moral dilemmas and work through them. Jake: You know I’ve thought about this a lot. Steve: Why am I not surprised? [laughs]. Jake: All screenwriting, all TV writing, it’s all political. Steve: Yeah, [laughs]. Jake: And it is socio-political, right? Like the act of doing it is a social and a political act. We’re actually looking inside ourselves, looking at our society, trying to understand some aspect of it. But it’s also political in that, regardless of what you put out there, you're the debate at the water cooler the next day. You're raising the questions that are going to be debated throughout the world. Steve: Exactly! That’s exactly right. When a student comes to me and says, “Well these are the themes and this is exactly where it rolls…” I think, “Well that’s morally very self-secure!” But it isn't going to be a very interesting movie or an interesting series. I want somebody to be talking to me about their own complex problems, with the questions that they can’t quite answer. Jake: We talk about engine all the time when it comes to TV Writing.  In a way, the engine is the unresolvable question. If you have a question and you can resolve it, if you know the answer, if you know the thing that would save the world, then the truth is you don’t have a series. It’s the unresolved questions, the constant search to try to understand the truth. Steve: Absolutely, absolutely! And that’s why the world of the series is such a vastly important thing when you're starting to conceive of a TV Drama. Because what you're really talking about is a world as a moral arena, as a moral universe, and you think about the specific kinds of choices a character can make within that moral arena. I always say that writing a movie or making a movie is really about building a journey. And writing a TV Series is about living in a building--with all these people living in all these different apartments. So the world of the show and the characters within it is really the essence of this. I want to talk about Engine in a few minutes, but that’s precisely it: the array of characters that populate that world. Just look at genres of television, their habitats: it’s hospitals, it is prisons, it’s the legal system, it is families, it is urban tribes or its conspiracies. These are the agreed-upon social entities. And in a way, they are also political entities, right?  The politics of the self. And within that particular world, are a certain set of moral choices that don’t necessarily exist outside that world. But they definitely have things in common with those worlds. One of the most wonderful things that you talk about, and that I think is so germane here, is that particularly if you're thinking about movies being about a character who changes and TV about a character who procrastinates, is that it always brings us back to the holdfast ego and the nascent ego. It’s wild how that keeps happening, again and again. Jake: Can you run through that real quick for anyone who is listening, who doesn’t know what they are? Steve: The holdfast ego is the ego you encounter when you wake up in the morning. You look in the mirror, you're putting on your makeup or you’re shaving, and you look in the mirror and you say, “Okay that’s Steve Molton, and Steve is this and Steve is that and it’s wonderfully predictable how he’s like that, and I know what he wants every morning, and I know where he comes from, and I know he has been a jerk, you know? Flopping at this and that. And I also know he’s fantastic! And he’s on his way somewhere.” But it’s basically the guy that you’re familiar with,