Write On: A Screenwriting Podcast

“I think [Here] has some of the imagination of Forrest Gump, but it's not Forrest Gump. It's a different animal. I mean, it has the same kind of humanity to it, which is what I'm pretty good at,” says Eric Roth about his latest film Here, co-written and directed by Robert Zemeckis and reuniting actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.  On today’s podcast, we speak with Oscar winning screenwriter Eric Roth about the challenges of writing the screenplay for Here that mostly takes place in one room, with a fixed camera that never moves. The movie explores the ordinary lives of multiple generations of families in a way that many will find relatable, heartbreaking and, at times, claustrophobic.  “I'm not sure [the characters in Here] are extraordinary or not, but they show the length and breadth of what people can and can't do and when they're trapped. I think when it works that way dramatically, it's quite lovely and quite beautiful. I don't want to use the word profound, but I think the [movie] is profound to a certain extent because it is just about the regularity of life. And that, from dinosaurs to the future, it's going to keep going. Hopefully people will find great joy in how they're living and I'm sure great pain too, but I think that's just sort of the circle of life,” he says.  We also discuss some of his other films like Forrest Gump, for which he won an Oscar, and Killers of the Flower Moon.  He shared this advice about using subtext in screenplays. “I think that I'm always trying to find a way to enhance the scene with not only subtext, but with some kind of metaphor and make it possibly more interesting as to getting to the root of people's feelings without them having to vomit out what they're saying you know. It's not easy, but I think as I've gotten more successful and more accomplished at it,” he says.  To hear more of Eric Roth’s advice for screenwriters, listen to the podcast.  

“Comedy and scares are so similar. I've found that in a lot of my scripts, it's almost like you're taking the peaks and valleys of humor, and the peaks and valleys of scares, and flipping them on each other. So, you have the scare that you come down from for a moment of brevity and humor, or just character work, and then you do another scare. You’ve relaxed them and then scare them again. The effect is that you're making the audience have a good time,” says Seth Sherwood, author of The Scary Movie Writer’s Guide. In this episode, we speak with Seth Sherwood, writer of horror movies like Leatherface and Hell Fest. He was also nominated for an Emmy for writing the TV show Light as a Feather. I chat with him about the long process of making Hell Fest with producer Gale Ann Hurd, the difference between internal and external horror, and his definition of grounded horror that’s so popular these days. He also gives his advice on what he thinks is the single best thing an emerging horror writer can do to help their career.  “Right now, the industry is in a retraction, there’s an implosion and streaming is dying. When people ask me now how to break in, I say I don’t know, but I think you’ll never go wrong in actually trying to make stuff like short films. I know it’s a whole other path and it’s a difficult thing to do but people will always watch stuff before they read stuff if they’re not writers. And those people are the gatekeepers. I always wanted to make my own films, but my writing career took off and I'm actually in a spot where I'm going backwards, where I have done so many writing assignments in the last few years but things aren't getting made – s­o, I’m going to go make a microbudget horror film on my own with my friends. The thing that I wanted to do when I was 20 years old. Because at least it's a thing that can be seen. And that has more weight than a script right now,” he says.  To hear more about horror writing from Seth’s perspective, listen to the podcast.

“We wanted the whole series, but specifically the pilot episode, to lure you in with the kind of comfort and coziness of the 80s nostalgia and the trappings of John Hughes movies, and all of that, while also giving it the 80s heavy metal flavor, and then start to build paranoia and change the vibe a little bit throughout. But we always knew that the series was going to hinge on this scene with Judith [Jessica Treska] where you realize that the beautiful girl next door is actually so much trouble!” says Matthew Scott Kane, creator and showrunner of Peacock’s Hysteria! Starring Julie Bowen, Anna Camp and Bruce Campbell.  The show explores the so-called Satanic Panic that actually happened in the 1980s at a fictionalized high school in the midwest. When a varsity football player disappears under mysterious circumstances, a struggling teen heavy metal band realize they can capitalize on the town’s sudden interest in the occult by creating a fake Satanic cult – to their surprise, everyone is into it. Things quickly get out of control when the town takes the cult more seriously than the high school band members.  In this episode of the Write On podcast, Kane talks about delving into the generational fear of teenagers, balancing horror with humor, and writing characters who need “to be seen” by their peers. He also shares details about his journey to becoming a professional TV writer,  specifically the many benefits of being an assistant in Hollywood.  “The biggest gift of being an assistant – which is not an easy job, it’s very difficult, it’s very time consuming, you have to be available 24/ 7 and it takes a lot out of you – but the best possible thing that you can get, and not all showrunners will do this, is to make yourself available to watch every step of the creative process. Make sure you are in the room while they are breaking story. Make sure you are reading outlines that are coming in. Make sure you’re in concept meetings, tone meetings, production meetings, all of these things that might feel like they don’t have anything to do with writing, but they have everything to do with writing,” says Kane.  To hear more, listen to the podcast.   

“Sometimes I think [the show Pachinko] is almost too personal. I feel like every show, you look at it and say, ‘How much of myself is in this show?’ I did a show [The Whispers] about children who were communicating with an invisible alien force and somehow, I had to figure out how to make it part of me as well. We try to put ourselves in as much of our work as possible. But with this show, the tipping point almost fell in the other direction, where I felt so personally invested. I felt very much like this is my family’s story, as well. That responsibility sometimes felt burdensome. So many of the cast and crew have said that there's a responsibility with this show that almost feels too much. But at the end of the day I think it's a thing that made us work harder. I think the show is as good as it is because people cared,” says Pachinko showrunner and creator Soo Hugh about making the story personal to her. In this episode, we speak to Hugh about the challenges of writing a show where characters speak in three languages, making the characters relatable to an American audience, and the responsibility of telling the stories of strong women over generations. “In Korean families, we always have these jokes that everyone knows who’s running the house – your mother! I think it's the strength of Korean women that have just carried us through,” she says. We even ask Hugh about her work on one of my favorite shows The Terror, and what she thinks really happened to the real-life British crew on the Terror and Erebus ships that got stuck in the Artic ice. Her answer may surprise you. To hear more, listen to the podcast.

“I think what Tim [Burton] does is he's always trying to simplify. That’s the essence of a classic filmmaker. People think he's wild and crazy and does all these things. His movies are brilliantly composed frames and he's always looking for simplicity. All of his big movies, they're really family dramas dressed up in whatever genre he's in. That's really what they are. And I think people think he’s always strange and weird and likes dark thing, but no! It's a classic story with good drama. And then he brings his sensibility to it,” says about the biggest lesson Al Gough has learned working with director Tim Burton on both the TV show Wednesday and the new film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. In this episode, we speak with writing team Al Gough and Miles Millar about creating the hit Netflix show Wednesday, how they cultivated a relationship with director Tim Burton and how that led to the sequel to Beetlejuice after more than 15 sequel scripts have surfaced over the last 36 years. Gough and Miles talk about crafting a mother/daughter love story for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and delving into grief, something that all families face at some point or another. The writers also share their insight into adding new characters in the mix and creating the strange yet rewarding musical numbers for the movie that includes one totally bonkers song.  Miles Millar also shares this career advice about staying in your lane when it comes to genre: “If you write a spec or a script that sells, and it's a romantic comedy, then you should really stay in the romantic comedy world and arena for a while. We always jumped around which I think hurt us initially. We did an action movie, we did a comedy, we did this, we did that. We did a fantasy. So, pick a lane. I think successful writers usually pick a lane and get known to do one thing – which can be constricting and suffocating, but I think it's something that's important in terms of a career.” Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is out now in theaters.   

Katie Robbins, the co-creator and showrunner of the animated series 'Sunny,' explores the complexities of artificial intelligence and its dual nature in storytelling. She discusses creating relatable characters, particularly the dynamic friendships between human and robot, emphasizing themes of isolation and emotional connection. Drawing influences from Japanese culture and popular films, Robbins reveals how these narratives can challenge societal perceptions of A.I. while engaging audiences with heartfelt relationships.

Almost all the characters [in Fallout, the TV show] are brand new… We really took the world of Fallout that had been built up and iterated upon by other video game writers over the years and we wanted to do our own version of it rather than retell any version that someone else has already done. Our attitude was like, ‘Okay, let's say this is a new Fallout game. What would it be?’ So, we took the world, the background, the themes of the games and the tone. It's a new story. New people,” says Graham Wagner, co-creator and showrunner of Fallout on Amazon Prime.   In this episode of the Final Draft’s Write On Podcast, we talk with Graham Wagner about Fallout, a show based on the beloved videogame, that’s earned 17 Emmy nominations including Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Wagner talks about taking the structure and tone from Sergio Leone’s Western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and focusing on three central figures: Lucy (Ella Purnell), The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) and Maximus (Aaron Moten), and intertwining their disparate storylines.   “We made an intentional collision of genres because Walton Goggins' character is very much of the wasteland of the Western genre, which is sort of apocalyptic in its own way, depending on your perspective. There isn't the infrastructure and people are trying to build civilization on the ashes of the civilization that has been eradicated before them. You know there's a lot of parallels there,” says Wagner.   To learn more about the show Fallout and hear Wagner’s advice for writing TV pilots, listen to the podcast.

“We were all six or seven years old when [the first Karate Kid movie] came out. So all of us saw it in the theater and I think for all of us, it was probably the first time any of us had seen a movie where there was such an amazing twist that happened. The whole time, we’re thinking that Daniel LaRusso's not learning [karate], that he's doing all these chores for this guy and then suddenly it's, ‘Wait! He's been learning karate the whole time!’ So anyone who watched the movie was blown away by that moment, but when you're six or seven it's a formative memory. So it was a movie that was meaningful to all of us,” says Jon Hurwitz, showrunner and executive producer of the Netflix show Cobra Kai. In this episode, I speak to all three showrunners of Cobra Kai, Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg about what the show means to them now that we’re in the sixth and final season. We discuss why they thought it was imperative to tell the story from the character Johnny Lawrence’s (William Zabka), point of view and they hint at the possibility of a new spinoff show – perhaps about a young Mr. Miyagi – coming soon. They also shared their advice for writing a spec script. “It's really tough to stand out. And that's what you have to figure out. In our early scripts, it was that first page – it was being R-rated and provocative and saying something that gets you noticed and stands out in the marketplace. Because if you're just writing a genre story, it's just like why?” says Josh Heald. To hear more about the sixth season of the show and their great advice for writing spec scripts, listen to the podcast.

“I came up doing improv where failure is the golden standard. And in improv, if you're not failing, you're doing something wrong. I feel really lucky that that was one of my bridges into entertainment and creativity, to have such a loving relationship with failure because, boy! As a writer, your days are filled with it and rejection and killing your darlings. I think comedy and improv have taught me how wonderful failure can be and how much we can get out of it for sure,” says Carrie Solomon, writer of the new Netflix romantic comedy, A Family Affair starring Nicole Kidman and Zac Ephron.  In this episode, Carrie talks about working as an assistant when she first came to Hollywood, calling it a job that can be, “Thankless at times, certainly, but really rewarding in the amount of information that you can absorb.”  She also talks about bringing her own life experience – like being an assistant – to her storytelling.  “Thematically, I think a lot of lot of the arcs in this movie are certainly my own. It’s my own therapy coming to the screen, going to the page. I should probably send my therapist a Netflix., QR code to go check out the movie,” Carrie says.  Carrie also shares a lot of advice, including how to get your writing noticed. “For anyone who wants to make a splash or write something crazy or noticeable, write something that's crazy to you. Don't worry about what. If you yourself were entertained or wowed by an idea or you think, oh my god, that's absolutely like ass backwards crazy. Try it. I have a lot of friends that the minute they stop worrying about audiences or development execs or what people want to read, that's when they really found their voice and it clicked. I think being personal is one of the one of the quickest ways to find success.” To hear more about Carrie’s writing journey, listen to the podcast.

In this episode, I talk with Dave Holstein, co-writer of the upcoming Disney/Pixar sequel Inside Out 2, which takes us back into the mind of a now teenage Riley as she navigates a whole new crop of personified emotions, including Envy, voiced by The Bear star Ayo Edebiri, and of course, Anxiety, voiced by Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke. Dave describes what it’s like working with a well-oiled storytelling powerhouse like Disney/Pixar, as well as co-writing with Inside Out franchise veteran Meg LeFauve to not only recapture some of the magic of the original film but to also create some of their own.