John J. Strauss: How to Get Staffed in a TV Writers’ Room

this is going to be a very special episode. It's it's really rare to get access and wisdom from somebody with the level of experience of John Strauss and we're very fortunate because you also couldn't meet a nicer guy. Oh, lies. Oh, I never mind. He's a total jerk. No, he's a lovely human being and he's here to help you and we're so glad the opportunity to take this inside the writer's room class with John and learn from a top showrunner is just a really incredible opportunity. So I hope that you take advantage of it and I'm actually going to start with with the first question. You have run some of the most successful shows and not just financially but also creatively and that means that you have hired countless writers and one of the things I'm curious about is what do you look for when you're staffing an emerging writer in your writer's room? Excellent question. Excellent question and you know, I will say that being being on the other side of the of the desk where you're an employer as opposed to an interviewee is really one of the best learning experiences because you really do get to see, you know, the types of people who stand out and I'm going to use one word that I use to all of my writing students and my pitching students and anybody who is preparing to go to a meeting and that is specificity and I'll actually add a second word which is preparation. When you're hiring, when you're for instance building a writing staff on a TV show, you're really building a ball team. It's like building a soccer team or a basketball team. You need or people like me, I want specialists. I want people who have very specific voices, talents, come from all walks of life, whatever country of origin, gender, age, all of the above. I do not want the same flavor over and over again and so what I tell people is figure out who the hell you are and you know, I hate to use the word brand so I'm not going to use it but at least figure out, you know, what your take on the world is, what your voice is, what interests you and you know, jig, I'm going to take a little extra time to answer this question because it really dovetails into so many different things but you're going to go to a lot of meetings where not only are you interviewing for a job but you may go to meetings with a call general meeting where someone has read a piece of your material, it could be an agent, a manager, a studio executive, network executive who wants to meet you, just wants to meet the person behind the script. I have a lot of meetings like that because I produce movies, higher writing staffs, etc. And honestly, I spend more time just getting to know the human being than I do, I wanted to, I always of course want to know their ideas and we get to that part of the meeting and that's the prep part which is that you have to be better prepared than anybody because the competition is so ferocious but equally important is I'm going to ask the basic questions as as our agents managers, the center which is our who the hell are you? What inspired you to become a writer? What inspired the script that I read? Who are some of your role models? Do you want to be Sean de Rimes? Do you want to be David E. Kelly? Do you want to be Quentin Tarantino? Whatever the hell it is, you know, where do you see your career a year, three years, five years, ten years from now? Where are you from? Have you seen this year's Academy Award nominee movies? What do you watch on television? What books have you read recently that inspired you? In other words, I want to get a full picture of the individual who I'm going to hire because, you know, particularly in a TV writer's room, I'm going to be spending, you know, 10 hours a day for possibly months with somebody and I want to make sure they're not a serial killer or what have you. You'd be stunned how many people come into these meetings ill-prepared for just answering the basic questions that I threw out there. A, they're scared to death and B, they just haven't thought about these things, so they're sort of caught flat-footed when I ask questions. So my advice to all of you is, be prepared for these people who you go into meetings with to want to know you as a human being and anticipate these kind of very basic questions because they're not trying to trick you. They just want to know who you are. Second of that is prep. Oftentimes on a TV staffing job, you may only have the pilot script to read. That's often the case, especially if it's a mini-room. They haven't produced anything. There's a pilot. Somebody's written a pilot. Well, you better read that damn thing backwards and forwards 30 times because someone like me, I don't want my ass kissed. I don't want somebody to come in and go, oh my god, this is the greatest thing I've ever read. No, I want somebody to come in with ideas. I want to say, what did you think of the script? Why are you sitting here? I want to know, you know, I want to hear their opinions and I want to hear ideas that they may have. I'm where the show could go. I want them to ask me questions. What were you thinking with this character? I didn't quite relate to this character. I wasn't sure what you're doing there. I want to know that this person is passionate. They've really studied the material. I mean, I've had meetings where people come in and they have nothing to say. I'm like, what did you think of the script? Oh, it was really good. Okay, well, what about it? What was good? Well, I really liked Nicole. Okay, well, what about Nicole? Well, she was really ambitious. Well, guess what? I'm not hiring that person, right? Because they don't have anything. So in writing and in meetings, be as specific as you can and be as prepared as you can. And I don't want another version of me. I want you. I want you. It's specificity of who you are and it's preparation because the competition is so ferocious. And so even when I go in, the last couple jobs I had, you know, Mozart and the Jungle was, I was part of a very large group of people who they interviewed. Same with Arcane to come in and run the show. And I won both of those contests. We call them Derby's. But the reason I want it, you know, partly was because I went in there, you know, like a maniac because I was so prepared. I knew the material inside out. So I had a million ideas. Now, they didn't like every single idea that I had. But what I certainly demonstrated was, hell, man, this guy really did his homework. And so that is the thing that I think all of us expect is why are you sitting here, you know, and clearly you want the job because you've really prepared your ass off, you know, for this, for this interview. So anyway, that's the long answer. That's hugely, hugely valuable. So the next question comes from Anthony Johnson. What does a showrunner actually do? And and for people who who already maybe understand that part, I'm going to kind of tack on another piece of it, which is you had to build yourself up to that level of being able to run a show. And I'm curious, how did you develop yourself as a writer to a place where you were ready to be a showrunner? It is a two part question. The first part, which is what is a showrunner do? I gave a lecture the other night to several hundred people about that. It was a three hour lecture. So we don't have that amount of time. I will give you a short list at the and the on the back half of the of the question. The first the first part is what do you do to prepare? The unfortunate thing that is happening in the business, I'm sure you've all heard the term mini room. And it is a cost saving thing that now the networks and the studios have done, which is that they now just, you know, someone like me will write a pilot and they'll say great, we'd like 10 scripts. And they give you X amount of dollars and I have to go out and hire a little what they call a mini room, meaning it's fewer people than used to they used I used to be able to hire and it's fewer weeks than I used to be able to work. And this is there's no guarantee of production at that point either. They just give you a pot of money and say go hire some people and generate 10 scripts. The unfortunate thing about that is that it has no longer allowed a training ground for young writers in the old days, and I mean the old days, meaning five years ago, it was they used to put a writing staff together when they knew they were going to go into production. So you were actually generating scripts while you were going into production. So it was all happening at once. So writers could go down and be on the set and see how things were going. And I'm being kind of a natural teacher mentor. I would grab a staff writer and say, hey, come to the sound mix with me. Hey, come to this casting session with me. Hey, come to this production design, meaning with me. And so you kind of learned, you know, by just shadowing the showrunner, if you had a decent showrunner who was willing to to teach you. Now it's a little harder with these mini rooms because you don't get any actual production experience. So there's two answers to this question. One is, if you find yourself in a mini room and it's going really well, obviously you want to, you know, you learn by doing and if you're a brand new staff writer, you're going to be scared, you know, you're not going to know when you pitch and you have to just kind of find your way, you know, learning when to speak, when not to speak. The one thing I would say, this is a little off topic, but the one thing I would say in a writer's room is never take anything personally. It is not a democracy. The showrunner is running the room. And if your idea gets shot down, move on and pitch something else. Don't ever, ever, ever take it personally. That's the worst thing you can do. But you can at least in a mini room prepare yourself. You can watch how the showrunner works. You can see how the showrunner, because one of the big things in what a showrunner does is running the writer's room. And that we're going to cover that in the class. I'm going to teach, but it is literally one of the hardest jobs on the planet, because you have to, you're like a circus ringmaster. You have to keep the train on the tracks, because you've got a very limited time to get things done. So, you know, at the, but at the same time, you have to enable your staff to be creative. And sometimes in a writer's room, people tell stories, they'll tell personal stories. But out of those personal stories come ideas for episodes. So you're always juggling how long do I let this person talk about their personal life, you know, until I shut it down and then say, okay, got it. Let's get back to the show. But that kind of conversation generates ideas. So that's one of the things. The other thing is just make being incredibly efficient with your use of time. And, and knowing that, you know, you have very limited hours to do it. And just as I said, keeping the train on the tracks, keeping the focus on the room. And, you know, if you have to shut somebody down, you do it in the kindest possible way. But there are just, it is, there's a thousand ways that a writer's room just, just go sideways. And a good showrunner will sort of gently keep things right on track while enabling the creative process. So that's the best you can do at least in a, in a, in a, in a writer's room as far as understanding what a showrunner does. And also understanding that there are endless amounts of notes that you're going to get from the studio, the network, the manager of your star, whoever the hell it is. And to be able to graciously take those notes, even if they're bad notes and incorporate them somehow into, you don't have to say yes to everything. You have to at least let people be heard, but that's a whole other subject. Now, in terms of what showrunners do, I mean, I'm just going to give you off the top of my head, a list, obviously, running the writer's room. Hot casting, you're, you're always in casting, putting your cast together, hiring directors, hiring every single department head on your crew from your line producer, which is a whole other half-hour discussion about who your line producer is. And I'll get back to that in a minute, but your line producer, your, your director of photography, your editor, your production designer, your set decorator, your props person, your wardrobe, hair, makeup, I mean, I hire every single department head in all of those divisions. And I manage each and every one of those departments because as the showrunner, the final word is mine. I also have to deal with actors who won't come out of their trailers because they're not happy with the scene. I have to deal with agents of talent who aren't happy with what the talent is doing. I have to deal with studio executives, network executives. When you hire a big star, that big star comes with their own production company and then the head of their production company is an executive producer on your show. So you got to deal with that person. Budgets, I have to constantly deal with, I'm spending too much money on this episode. So I have to borrow from another episode and spend less money. I spend a ton of time with my line producer, who's in charge of sort of not in charge of, but kind of charts how you're spending your budget. And that person is accountable to both you, the showrunner, but also to the bank and the bank being the Netflix, the Hulu, the NBC, whoever it is. They're caught between a rock and a hard place, but I keep that person very, very close to me because the main job in my humble opinion of a showrunner is never get caught with your pants down. Always be prepared because it is again, it's a race against time. You never, ever, ever want to fall behind. You never want to have a script, fall apart because it's the budgets too much for that episode. You have to head all of these things learn to head all of these things off at the past. So you don't find yourself, oh my god, we're a week behind schedule. So so much of good show running is, you know, and this honestly just comes with experience is knowing where the potential pitfalls are going to be, where the potential snags are going to be that could put you behind anticipating them, heading them off at the past. And that's why, you know, when you get to a level of being a showrunner, you become a very valuable commodity because you're not only more attractive as somebody who's created your own show, but you can get hired to either co-run or run other people's shows because you've been, you've just been flying the plane a long time and you kind of know, oh, okay, I know what to do in this situation. It's not like you're smarter. You've just been doing it a long time. So anyway, that's again, the sort of abridged answer to your question. Thank you so much, John. That was, that was awesome. Here's a question from Saurajar, who hopefully I didn't butcher their name. If you could go back and give yourself advice at the beginning of your writing career, what would you say? Don't be so fucking scared. You know, it's, it's, I was so nervous and so frightened at the beginning of the process. And when I first got my butt into a writer's room, you know, I was worried about every minute and, oh my god, I'm not talking enough. Oh my god, I'm talking too much. Oh my god, what does this person think of me? I was all up in my head. And so I, if I could go back, I would just say, you know, be a little more zanned about things, you know, live a little more in the moment. Don't be so like completely like the critical voice taking over everything. And I would also say, you know, be more confident in, in your writing voice, you know, and don't like just take some chances, you know, really be, be just a little more confident. And it's a very hard thing because, you know, confidence is gained with experience, you know. So it would really be those two things, just get out of your head a little bit and just try to enjoy it more. I think that I was so incredibly uptight about succeeding and what everybody thought and did I screw that up? And I'm probably that way to this day. But just a little more of a healthy attitude of just like, hey man, you know, you're, you're, you're here for a reason, you know, they want you here. So like embrace it and enjoy it. Just enjoy it a little bit more. And don't, and this is good life advice, too. You know, which is just don't be so result oriented every second. Try to, you know, the cliche would be enjoy the ride, enjoy the ride, you know, and take it in. Those would be really the big, big things that I would advise my young self. Yeah, I always say writing is a radical act of trust in yourself. And I really, I really love that, that, you know, yeah, we get, we're privileged, right? We get to do this. Yeah, exactly. And that's the other thing is, is very true. And, and, you know, I see people come in and they're just like, they're just mad and, you know, they just have a bad attitude. And I'm like, you know, hey, man, do you guys have privilege? We are like, we get to do this. Like, you know, and, and so that's an important thing. I have a, I always did have a good attitude. So I never, but, but I think it's important to try to enjoy yourself, you know, yeah. Yeah. Here's a question for, from Ali, for emerging writers hoping to break into TV. What should we be focusing on in our character work to stand out in the industry? And what makes a character feel like they belong in a show that could actually get picked up? That's a great question. It's going to come back to the, the, the mantra that I began with, which is specificity. Okay. I, again, as an employer, I read a massive amount of scripts. And I'm also a professor. And so I read a massive amount of student scripts. And the one thing that I would say, and this is true of even, you know, scripts that CAA sends me from writers who they want me to hire, most scripts are generic. And by that, I mean, I feel like I have seen and heard the characters before. And I feel like I've seen and heard the stories before. And so this is the key. I mean, it's such a good question. And I really, really, I think this is the best advice I could possibly give you all specificity of voice and specificity of character. And when I say voice, I mean dialogue. And the, here's the reality. And, and if I have one skill in the world, it's truly knowing what people are looking for in, in the job market. Because I do it myself. And I'm surrounded by studio and network executives and agents, many of whom are my friends. And they tell me this. When someone picks up a script or clicks it under their computer screen, this is just reality. They do not read or they skim at best the description that you write. So we all sit there and we spend and countless hours getting every frickin' word perfect and our little action lines and this and that. And then a lot of us, many, and I urge people to try to limit this to some degree, overwrite. And you end up with these giant paragraphs of the sun is dappling through the window and the leaves are casting their shadows on the one not smart. That's for novels and short stories. It is not for television writing and screenwriting. Now, a lot of what I say is a little hyperbolic and I'm not gonna say these are absolute laws, fundamental laws, but what I am giving you and will give you is very practical advice. What I always recommend is think about, there's a book called The Art of War. And in The Art of War, they talk about looking at the world through the eyes of your enemy. And your enemy is the overworked ADHD, but you know, overburdened studio executive, network executive agent manager, who often, these are, again, friends of mine, they tell me, they go home sometimes with 30 scripts to read over the course of a weekend from say young emerging writers, pilots, movies, what have you. Now, look, they wanna be with their families, they wanna be surfing, they wanna be out having fun. And instead they're stuck, and they're in their place having to read 30 scripts of the weekend. And then more often, they're not. They're on their pelotons, you know, reading these scripts on their iPad. They're not paying full attention, they can't. They don't have the bandwidth, they're exhausted, they've gotta get through all this work. So the net result of everything I just said is that they don't read things very carefully. What they do is they go to the damn dialogue, okay? And this is just reality folks. They, you write a beautiful prose paragraph of action, and they're gonna go, where does it take low? Okay, it's in the living room, fine. What are the characters saying? If you're able to write very, very specific characters with very specific voices, and so that each character sounds different from the other, because this is the other thing that I find, is I'll read these scripts, and I'll go win them in it. I could change any of these character names. I could sub out each character name, and it wouldn't matter, because they all sound the same. And if you read a great play, and I've hired several playwrights in my career on my writing staffs who've had no experience writing television, I don't care, because I read their plays, and I'm like, oh my God, this person can really, there's nowhere to hide, obviously, in a stage play, it's all dialogue and character. So if I read something, and I'm like, oh my God, those are incredible characters, and with incredible points of view, and incredible dynamics that leap in quotes leap off the page, I'm like, I wanna know this person. So I would say that one trick that I would recommend is for something no one will ever read, but yourself do little character biographies on each character. Just do like a page, page and a half. Just freestyle, ask yourselves, where are they from? What's there, a people love to use the term core wound? You know, like, what happened to them? There's a thousand different versions of that. What trauma is did they have in life? What's their fundamental drive in life? And why? You know, just basic questions about who they are as people, so that you can develop, it's almost like you're an FBI, you know, serial killer, profiler, you know, putting together like a dossier of, you know, what who this person is, so that you may end up with seven, eight different bios, all your different characters. So now you at least have some sense of what drives them, what do they want, why do they want it? What's standing in their way? Who, what kind of people did they get along with? What kind of people do they hate? What are their politics? What sets them off? What makes them happy? And you're gonna come up with obviously multiple versions of answers. So I do that, I don't do it as much anymore. I think I've gotten lazy, but earlier in my career, I did that to a fault so that I at least knew the people that I was writing about. And then I'd start in on the dialogue and then I do a dialogue pass on every single fricking character. You know, I look at each, you know, I'll say I'm gonna do a dialogue pass on, you know, on Sarah right now and I look at every line Sarah says throughout the script and I wanna make sure that she has a very specific way of talking whatever it is. Everybody on this Zoom speaks differently. Some of us speak in more short clipped sentences, some of us ramble, some, whatever it is. But if you can do that on the page and just really get some, you know, crackling specific characters in dialogue, it will get you work. I promise you because no one gives a shit like, so what, you know, you read a pilot and you get to page, you know, 45 in an hour drama and there's one plot turn that doesn't make sense to you. I'm not gonna not hire somebody because of a little plot twist that I don't agree with. If I'm like engaged and like, oh my God, these are incredible characters, I'm going to hire that person. Then I'm rambling, but let me just, let me finish with this one thought. I always ask myself what is going to get this overworked agent manager executive to click to the next page. And so I'm always asking myself, what am I feeling? If I'm reading this script for the first time and I'm on my Peloton on a Saturday afternoon, what am I feeling? What is engaging me in keeping me in the read because I promise you folks, if you don't grab somebody by page three or four, they're clicking to the next script. That's it. People do not sit there and give you the benefit of reading your entire pilot or your movie. They just don't because they don't have the time to do it. They're not assholes, they just don't have the time. So you have to, man, you got to reach out there and just go and pull them in right away with really interesting situations and really interesting characters. And it's, I know it sounds sort of simple, but obviously it's not. Lastly, on those first five pages, I rewrite them, I rewrite my own scripts, my own first five pages, 20 times before I, before I'm satisfied, 'cause I'm like, it's not good enough. Not good enough for the Peloton executive. They're not gonna think of a movie like Lady Bird, and if you haven't seen it, see it. But it's the simplest thing in the world. It's a mother and a daughter, you know, going to look at schools in a car. It's not a laser battle in space, but it just builds through this crescendo and she jumps out of the car, the daughter. Okay, I wanna know what's gonna happen, you know what I mean? So you gotta think in terms of how am I gonna engage somebody right away and keep them along for the ride. - Yeah, and I love that you spoke about feeling, right? Like we also often think that like a producer, a manager, an agent like that buying a script or hiring a writer is a logical decision, but it's also an emotional decision, right? - Absolutely. - Absolutely. - Yeah, that was incredible advice. Here's a great question from Vincenza. You know, anybody who has gotten to the next step where you've pitched a pilot, someone's read your pilot, they like it. Almost always the next question is, can you get a showrunner attached? And so this question from Vincenza is, what attracts you to attack yourself as a showrunner to another writer's pilot or potential show? - It's specificity. I hate to keep coming back to this, but it's if I read a script that just has a voice like, like, oh my God, this person has such a strong, strong perspective. This is nothing like anything I've ever read before. And then I just have to be attracted to the world and what the who the characters are. So that's, and then the next thing I have to do is I have to sit down with the writer and make sure that we vibe because it's a marriage. It's a real marriage, you know, and so that leads me to the part two of the answer, which is when you, as emerging writers, write something that gets sold and that they're gonna pair you with someone like me, you gotta be really careful, really careful because there are different versions of people like me. I happen to be somebody who, you know, I create my own stuff so that if I go in and I meet with a writer, it just happened last week where I'm just gonna be there as the sort of backstop, you know, to make the suit happy. Then I go in and I say to the writer right away, I say, look, I am here to foster and enable your vision. Okay, that is my job. My job is not in my head to come in and piss all over your idea and say, my way or the highway at all. I just wanna help you make this the best possible vision that you created because I do my own stuff and I can, I have the confidence to go do that. There's different, you know, jobs for different jobs. what you do not want as an emerging writer. somebody to come in and basically just like you get this bad vibe that they're going to just going to come in and like not listen to you. And I mean, there is a lot of bad people out there. And you got to be super, super careful. You got to have your antenna tuned really high to not pair yourself up with somebody who is going to be, who's going to co-opt your vision, take credit for it, stab you in the back, exercise their power. There are a lot of people like that. So you got to be super, super, super careful to pair yourself. And in any situation you find yourself in like that, they had better the meaning, the Netflix, the ABC, whatever it is. They had better give you multiple choices. You never want to be in a situation where like, this is your person, love it or leave it. That's bad. So you have to lean on your representatives at that point. You don't want to fight directly with the distributor or the bank. You want to go to your reps and say, listen, I didn't vibe with this person. And they're telling me that's my only person. You don't want to do that. You want to gently say, hey, do you have anybody else I can meet with? Because you know, you never want to enter into a situation with a bad feeling because it never works out. Well, it just never works out well. So really have your antenna up and look for people who are going to be genuine partners with you and help you and aren't there to take the credit and be egomaniacs. So it's a delicate process. This is a question from Clara that relates to something you were talking about earlier. She's asking, what are the most common notes you've gotten and how to navigate those? And if I can tap onto that, like, how do you deal with notes that you feel are destructive to your project? So, hey, the most common notes are always about stakes and also just explaining things. It was so funny because on this last show, I did David Makes Man. Nobody's heard of it. It's on Max. It's a great show. Terrell McRainey, who won the Oscar for Moonlight, created it. And it's very much like Moonlight, but a TV series. And Terrell is a fucking genius, smartest person I've ever, ever met times 10. And his writing is so rich and so subtle. And we were on own, exclusively, originally, and no shade whatsoever to own or Oprah, who did give me a hug, by the way. Own, the own audience is a little bit more like broadcast television, meaning that they need things kind of explained to them. Like, their brand is like, it's not subtle. Let me put it that way. And David Makes Man is very subtle. So we were constantly being in these notes of like, but we don't know what's happening. We don't know what's happening. And then Terrell would very gently say, yes, but in 20 seconds of screen time, you will know what is happening. And so those on that one and on most of the things I do, the most common note is, well, we need to clarify that. We need to clarify. We need to know. No, you don't. And you never talk to a executive that way. And I'll get to that in a minute. But those are the most common notes. They want you to just constantly overexplain and spoon feed every single thing to the audience, which is not good writing, of course. And then they want to know like, well, what are the things? Well, at this moment, somebody doesn't have a gun to their head. So there are no actual, this person isn't going to die in this moment. So those are the two, the two, the two big ones. Then look, the longer answer, which I'm only going to spend two minutes answering is how to take notes. And I mean, this is a really long answer short and substantially, which is never, ever, ever get in an argument in a public forum with an executive, a studio executive, a network executive, a manager. The note giving process, particularly in a in a group situation, say after a table read, where everybody's there and everybody's hearing the notes is as much of a pissing contest and a exercise of power than it is anything else. So again, it's looking at the world, the eyes of your enemies. So when you're after a table read and you're getting a thousand notes from the head of the network on down, a lot of is just like them, you know, flexing their muscles and exercising power. And it's not as much about the content. And so I've seen writers kill their careers by arguing in these public forums with a network president who now is going to be embarrassed in front of their staff. Never going to work at that network again. So the one that's rule number one is just don't argue with anybody ever. Okay, no matter how bad the note is, go back, you always okay, then part two, because you do have to be as you have to be in order to be a show runner, you have to be a business person, you have to be a creative person, you have to be a psychologist, you have to be a politician, you have to have all these skills to be a good one. And in the notes, taking process, you have to be a psychologist and a politician. And so no matter how bad the note is, people just want to be heard. That's it. They don't want to be made to feel stupid. Because I've seen writers and frankly, all of you in this room are smarter than the average person because you're writers. We are all smarter than than executives because they're executives and they'd be writers if they were smarter. So fine, you know that. So they're going to give you dumb ass notes. So you do not ever want to make them or anyone in your life feel stupid. No one on earth wants to be made to feel stupid. And I've seen writers go, what are you talking about? It's right here on page 32. Is that smart? I don't think so. Because A, they're not being heard and B, they're made to feel stupid. So you get a shitty note and you go, got it? You don't roll over. You don't go, oh, yes, yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. No, you just go understood. Got the note, got the note. We will work on it or I will go think about it. But so then they go, okay, this asshole just heard me and I can move on to my next problem. And so always just make people feel heard. And then 24 hours later, they're going to be on to a thousand other things. You have to understand that all of these executives agents, whoever, they're all over work. They've got 40 projects going. They're not sitting there worrying about some dumb ass note on your dumb ass pilot at three in the morning. They're on to putting out brush fires elsewhere. So you wait 24 hours. You either solve the note to your satisfaction. But if you can't solve it, then you call somebody. Usually the, there's a lower level executive assigned here project. You call that person and you say, hey, remember that note? You know, the network president gave after the table read about XYZ. And more often than not, the lower level executive will go, yeah, they won't even remember. And you'll go, hey, you know, I or we thought about it and didn't quite solve it the way he or she pitched it, but we were going to solve it this way. What do you think? 100% of the time they will go, oh, that's fine. Right. Because they're on to other shit. And so it's so simple. And I want to just like grab all these writers and just go, don't you get it just like way to day. And then in the event, and I'm almost done with this thing, but in the event that you get a note that you just cannot solve the way they want you to solve it, you are smart. You'll come up with at worst, a lateral move. It won't be worse and it won't be better. It'll just be different. And sometimes you've got to do that. Sometimes you just have to make it different. And then they're heard. Then they're like, oh, there's little asterisks on page 32 here, where they made a change. And in your mind, okay, yeah, I would have preferred it the original way. I did it, but this is, oh, this is fine. It's different, but it's not worse. I promise you, I have never in my career turned something in after getting a bunch of shitty notes and felt like I compromised it. I would have preferred not to have to go through the motions of doing the notes, but you won't, no matter how bad the note is, you'll figure out a way at least to make it, you know, sort of even to where it was. So I can't give you more adamant advice than just don't, don't fight. It's hard enough. It's a very small town, Hollywood. And reputations are made like that. And if you get the reputation of being an attour and someone who's difficult to work with, it is very difficult to dig yourself out of that hole. But on the other side, I'm not saying roll over and take it. I'm just saying figure out how to do it without alienating the people who are giving the note. Yeah. And just to jump on that, like, you know, John has generated Emmy Golden Globe Peabody award winning stuff, right? So this is not talking about compromising your creative vision, talking about being a team player, right? And realizing that everyone's needs have to get met for your series or your movie to be successful. Can I add one thing to that, which is, and I say this day, every writer I ever talked to, it is a collaborative medium, okay? Screenwriting and television writing, if you cannot handle getting notes as a director or a writer or an actor, you're in the wrong business. I'm sorry. And you should be a playwright or a novelist where you have to deal with far fewer voices, fucking with your vision, okay? Quit now. If you really decide, I can't handle people giving me notes. It's the wrong business for you, because that's just the nature of the animal. There's like three people on earth, you know, Shonda Rhymes doesn't probably doesn't have to deal with notes, you know? David Chase, who created the sopranos at its peak, was probably not having to deal with notes. I mean, there's like five people on the planet who don't have to deal with the other thousands around the world have to. Beautiful, John. Here's a question from Andres and Grasia. When writing a script for film and compiling materials for the pitch, what are some additions that could bring more weight to the pitch deck that are not often mentioned? And I think you're going to apply that to TV as well. Yeah. So you're talking about like, what can you do to make your particular pitch as sparkly and amazing as possible? Yeah. Again, you go ahead, Jake. Yeah, I think that's what he's asking. Yeah. I mean, again, a three hour, I mean, I teach an entire 15 week pitch course. So I'll try to distill it into two minutes. I mean, first of all, don't exceed 20 minutes. You make 20 minutes your target. It could be 15 minutes, it could be 22 minutes. But some people go out with these 45 minute pitches. Are you insane? I mean, come on, these people have no in the same way they have no attention span on reading your script, they have they have less attention span sitting there listening to you talk, because again, you are the fifth or sixth meeting over the course of the day, they're exhausted. They've got problems they've got to deal with. They're barely listening to you. So keep it short. Speak at a normal rate of speed, the other thing that I find inexperienced pictures, dude, I talk of my own minute and then then you wipe through the door and then like there's a meteor shower and then then then Bill and Sarah and they start with all the names. And the audience, the person pitching to his lost in the first like 30 seconds, who the hell are these people? What are these names? You got to slow it down. You got a pause, you got to go, Hey, are we good? Any questions so far? Rehearse the hell out of the pitch. I mean, rehearse it over and over and over again, tell it, pitch it to your family, your friends, your colleagues, ask them where are you getting lost? What's boring? Tess, you got to test market these things, man, you got to think of a pitch like you're selling a refrigerator. I mean, it's no different. It's sales. And again, this drives me nuts because I'm not saying you're compromising your artistic integrity by doing this pitching is sales. You got to be a amazing salesperson to then get to the next level of the video game, which is being selling your thing and then being a brilliant artist. The pitch is it's pure sales. And so those are some of the tips about keep it at a reasonable cadence, anticipate where people might get lost. Visuals are great. I pack my visuals, my pitches with visuals. I never ever put text when I'm doing a verbal pitch. And I have a visual come up, a lot of people make the mistake. This is it's all common sense, folks. A lot of people make the mistake of actually putting the text on the screen of what they're saying. Well, if you think again, eyes through your enemy, they somebody listening to your pitch is going to be reading the text on the screen. They're not going to be listening to what's coming out of your mouth, right? They can't do. They physically cannot do two things at once. So limit, don't put any fucking text on the screen. Maybe if you have a, and I do this always, I always have when I introduce characters in my pitch, I pick like a iconic name that I know I can't get like Tom Cruise or Merrill Street, or, you know, whomever it may be, who I know I'm never even get from a dopey little TV series. But I use them as an iconic like archetype basically. And so I put, you know, Tom Cruise on there and then I'll put his character name in the pitch at the bottom. So they go, okay, it's that, that genre of person, but that's about it as far as any text is concerned. So but I do, I love visuals and people love them because it just breaks it up. They don't have to listen to my ugly face, you know, pitching to them for 20 minutes. They get to look at pretty cool things. I love to give tone, you know, like, here's kind of the vibe of the piece and kind of the, you know, what we're the world we're going to be in. And it really does help. And even things like proof of concept, like I just pitched and sold us a surf, a surf series to Netflix. And the my partner on it is a director. He paid a bunch of his friends or just called in a bunch of favors. And he made like a three minute little demo, you know, like not with obviously the cast that we're going to have because we don't know who the cast is going to be, but he just called in a bunch of favors. So we started that pitch. We're going to say we said, Hey, we got a three minute little, you know, video here we want to show you just to kind of give you a little vibe of what the show is going to look like. They love that shit, you know, so proof of concept in some way, shape or form, you don't want to show them a 20 minute short film. But just something, you know, really short as a, as a, an example. So slow it down, rehearse the hell out of it, visuals, proof of concept. And then I, again, it's a longer conversation about what I put into pitches. So I don't think we want to spend the rest of the time doing that. But that's kind of the short version. All right, we're going to do one more question. And then I want to talk about the inside the writers room class with people can get a sense of of what that is. And I thought this was an interesting one. What is the worst piece of advice you've ever gotten? And that's from Rainbow. Stand your ground, never compromise. Worst piece of advice one could possibly give. Stand your ground. What the fuck does that mean? Like argue with everybody. So yeah, that was a horrible, horrible piece of advice that somebody gave me. An excellent piece of advice that somebody gave me very early in my career was have multiple projects going because everything takes forever. I just wrote a pilot on spec, sent it out to a bunch of producers. It's been six weeks. And I've only gotten, say, 10% of those people have read it, yeah, have read it. So what am I going to do? Sit here like staring at the ceiling. No, I've got six other projects that I'm working on simultaneously. So I would say that's a good piece of advice is have a bunch of things going on because everything takes forever. Yeah, what an awesome session. This has been John. Could you talk a little bit about the inside the writers room class and how it's going to work and what people are going to learn in there? Absolutely. You know, there's no experience like the experience itself. So this is really like a simulated version of what it's like to be in a writers room. And it's in a very practical application of everything that goes on a writers room. So what I do, I take the show, the newsroom, which was an Aaron Sorkin show of many years back. And I ask whoever's going to be in the class, I have them watch the pilot episode in advance of the class, only the only the pilot episode. Nothing else is essential to not watch the series on just the pilot because that is the simulation of you go into a right real writers room and you've got either a filmed pilot or a pilot script to work with. That's it. And what we do is we literally break the first season of the episode of the show. And in the case of the newsroom, it's dated to some degree because it's it's a mostly white cast. So there's very little diversity in the cast. So we update it to make the cast more relevant to the world today. So we keep we because again, the object of the exercise when you get into a writers room is you want to honor the template of the pilot. You don't want to reinvent. They bought the damn pilot and they bought the damn series. So you're going to now imitate the pilot into episodes. So but what we will do, as I said, will change some of the backgrounds of the characters, but we keep the characters the same, you know, in terms of who they are as people. And we literally do what I do in a writers room. We start at the 50,000 foot level. And and we we talk about the character arcs. What we want to see them do over the course of the season. We talk about what what is the show said in 2025 as it said in 1990. What are the news stories that went on in those in those in those times? What are some interesting news stories we could we could cover. And we literally put together all the the the the the what's happened. history of what season one will look like and we sort of will break it down into, you know, eight to 10 episodes. And I try to give, depending on the size of the class, I try to give everybody a little bite at the apple of running the room and just show them how incredibly difficult that process is. And then I have someone taking notes and I have someone, you know, we'll we're going to figure out a way to have like a simulated, because we always use whiteboards in the writers room where we're writing stuff on the board. So we'll have some simulated version of a whiteboard. And I'm going to literally go through every single step of what it is like to break a season of television. And it's kind of magic. It really is a hell of a lot of fun. And you just can't believe how like how it really starts to come together and you're like, oh, my God, it demystifies the process. And people come out of they're going, this is actually fun. And I'm not scared of it anymore. It's actually, I can't wait to go do this. So that's that's it in a nutshell that it sounds so awesome. As JD says, seems like it can't miss class. It is, you know, to do this, you know, John also teaches several of the top film schools in the world to do this at those schools is $80,000 a year, right? And you can take this class here for $375. You even get a one-on-one consultation with one of our faculty members who will read up to 10 pages of your writing, give you feedback on how you're applying these concepts to your own screenwriting. And if you want to study with John and for the inside of the writers room, you can be at any level of experience. So that class is open to anyone. If you're a more experienced writer and you want to study with John, we also have just a few spots available in our Pro Track Mentorship Program where John will meet with you every week or every other week. He will mentor you through your entire career if you want. You'll read the writing that you're doing, the drafts that you complete, and he will get help you get your writing up to the professional level. And he's going to do the same thing. Again, this is by application only an eight-person group that we call a workshop. So if you're interested in it, this is going to sell out. You want to reach out to our team now and get in because we only have a few spots available with him. John, thank you so much for this incredible session. Is there any last piece of wisdom you'd like to leave everybody with? Yes, and I close every speech, whether it's in front of 20 or 20,000 with this concept, which is the key to happiness. And I've learned it in my life, and I want to share the key to happiness with you all. And the key to happiness is service to others. Service to others can mean anything to anyone. It can mean just reading a friend's script. It can mean being in the big brother, big sister program. It could mean helping a less advantaged high school student who is trying to apply to college and needs help with their college essay. You're all writers. You can all do that. There's a thousand ways to be of service to other people. And I promise you as a neurotic lunatic writer myself, it is a guaranteed way to get out of your head and just not being neurotic and crazy for a few hours here and there. So find in your lives. If you want to be happy, find in your lives ways to be of service to others big or small. That is the key to life. Trust me on this. I always close with that. That is beautiful, John. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody. Great questions.