First Draft Episode #239: Ben Blacker
MARCH 12, 2020
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Ben Blacker is a writer and producer known for The Thrilling Adventure Hour, Supernatural, Hex Wives, and the new Audible audio series CUT + RUN. He also hosts The Writer’s Panel and Dead Pilots Society podcasts.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Ben Blacker, a writer and producer of television, movies, comic books and more who along with his co-writer Ben Acker is best known for The Thrilling Adventure Hour, Supernatural, Hex Wives and the new audible audio series Cut + Run.
Ben also hosts The Writer's Panel and Dead Pilots Society podcasts. I loved what Ben had to say about the value of networking with peers. The best advice he ever got about writing for comics, living in the golden age of tone, and on hearing the music of comedy.
Everything Ben and I talked about today, and there was a lot, can be found in the show notes @firstdraftpod.com. Seriously, these show notes were a beast to put together. They're such a rich resource, tons and tons of links to other amazing creators, to movies, and TV shows, and books. Just a whole host of fantastic things. So definitely check those out.
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And finally, if you have any writing or creativity questions that you'd like me and a guest to answer in an upcoming mailbag episode, I would love to hear that. You can call and leave your question at First Draft's voicemail that's at (818) 533-1998. Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Ben Blacker.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Hi Ben, how are you?
Ben Blacker: I'm good.
Sarah Enni: Good. I'm so glad to meet you. I'm excited to chat. I've heard the other side of many stories about you.
Ben Blacker: Yeah, I feel you have our whole origin story so we don't have to do it.
Sarah Enni: So there's some parts we can skip over. So I am familiar with your friend and co-writer, Ben Acker. And Ben Acker has also been on the show [listen to his First Draft interview here]. I interviewed him when you guys were writing Star Wars middle-grade novels. And so anybody who's interested in hearing more about Ben and Ben's writing can also listen to his episode, which I'll link to in the show notes. But I'm excited to talk to you today. I always start with some bios. So I'm gonna go ahead and ask you, where were you born and raised?
Ben Blacker: I was born outside of Boston and raised in that same place.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] In the same place. So all the way through high school?
Ben Blacker: Yeah, I lived there until I went to college, I went to Syracuse. Which is where I met both Acker and my wife. So both of my longest relationships. And have been in LA now for sixteen years.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Well let's get to that. I'm interested in growing up, how was reading and writing a part of childhood for you?
Ben Blacker: I was a good reader as a kid. My mom's sister, my aunt, was a children's librarian. And so yeah, there was a lot of recommendations and piles of books foisted on us. And she was so engaged as a librarian, and she worked at our school for awhile, and she worked at other schools. So she always knew what were the books everyone was talking about.
So I feel as a kid, especially, I read everything. Anything that she gave me, I read cause I liked her so much and I trusted her. And it was everything from Beverly Cleary (author of Beezus and Ramona, and Ramona Quimby, Age 8) and Zilpha Keatley Snyder (author of The Egypt Game and The Famous Stanley Kidnapping Case) was a big one. Do you remember her?
Sarah Enni: Ooh, no.
Ben Blacker: I bring her up every once in awhile, especially to book people, and it feels like she's been forgotten.
Sarah Enni: Do remember the titles?
Ben Blacker: Her big title was The Egypt Game, which I had to read in elementary school and is the one most people know. She had a couple of other big ones, but she wrote a hundred middle-grade and younger books, mostly middle grade, that were all either vaguely supernatural or had some thriller or adventure element. And I loved those so much.
And she was the first writer that I met in person. She was doing a reading at the Boston Public Library and my mom took me to go talk to her, and I remember asking her a question. But mostly it was like, "Oh, this is a real person. Writers are real. You can do this for a living." And she was this super nice lady probably in her sixties or seventies at that time.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And actually that's so interesting that you got to have that experience because I think it's a relatively recent phenomenon that writers go to schools pretty often now. I think a lot of times, kids at all levels of schools, to have the opportunity to meet writers and sort of get that like, "Oh this is real." That can't not have been formative for you. It seems you were probably a creative little guy.
Ben Blacker: I was, but I think I only realized how formative that was in the past couple of years. I had totally forgotten about her too after reading everything as a kid, I looked her up maybe a couple of years ago when people were like, "What IP do you like? What do you want to develop for TV?" I was like, "Oh, I remember loving her stuff." And she passed away maybe five years ago, something like that in her nineties.
But yeah, that must have been formative. Seeing a person who makes the stuff that I liked.
Sarah Enni: And you got to ask her a question, that's so tangible. Like, "I love these things, and someone makes them." I think we can't underestimate how powerful that is for fledgling creatives.
Ben Blacker: Absolutely. I mean, say what you will about social media, but that kind of access is good and bad.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, right. Then people who shouldn't maybe be creative. No, I'm just kidding. I love that you just described her books as thrilling and adventure.
Ben Blacker: I didn't realize I did, but yes [laughing].
Sarah Enni: Very appropriate. Cause I want to ask about comics and genre too. I didn't grow up as a comics reader. So I'd love to hear how you got into them and what were your books?
Ben Blacker: Yeah, it was my dad. My first comics were my dad's early sixties, mid-sixties, Spiderman, Batman, mostly Marvel comics, Fantastic Four stuff like that, which he had in our attic. Because I grew up in the house in which he grew up.
Sarah Enni: Oh wow. That's so special.
Ben Blacker: After moving around, he moved back there when his parents moved to Florida. It's special and weird. They're still there and maybe it's time to go.
Sarah Enni: Interesting! Oh my gosh. I love that that was kind of a family thing though, a connection with your dad to read what he read as a kid.
Ben Blacker: It was. Yeah, he was a comic book kid. He was a big sci-fi nerd, which actually put me off of the genre for a long time. And I never thought of comics as genre for some reason. Maybe I thought of it as a medium and not the genre within the medium. But comics were always okay with me, but I did not like science fiction. I'm still not a big science fiction person. Because my dad loved Star Trek. He also took me to see Star Wars and that stuff.
So certainly it was formative for me, but yeah, I resisted a lot of that for a long time. And maybe it was because I loved Batman comics, but I got into crime and that kind of stuff. Crime stories, not actual crime [laughing].
Sarah Enni: [Laughing] And we'll come back to that because I just thought that's such an obvious thread through a lot of what you guys write, is a lot of genre. And I am interested in how was creative writing a part of your life or when did that come into your life?
Ben Blacker: It kind of always was. I mean, I was a big player as a kid. I loved to pretend. But also I loved TV. Even as a kid. I remember in kindergarten playing Three's Company and the Love Boat with Vicki Fang and Randy Digerian. Every day, building blocks, building sets and stuff like that. And playing as if we were in the TV shows. And then in third grade I wrote basically fan fiction for a TV show, which I'm sure you do not remember, cause you are younger than I am, but Scarecrow and Mrs. King.
Sarah Enni: I know the name, but I haven't seen it.
Ben Blacker: A Mystery of the Week show with Kate Jackson was the star, and I loved it. As a third grader, which is insane! This was a show for grownups. I know it was on at nine o'clock. But I loved it and I wrote a story that had these characters in it and I remember distinctly creating this thing and liking the sensation of that.
Sarah Enni: So, even from early writing, you really were inspired by TV.
Ben Blacker: I really was! [Laughs]
Sarah Enni: And when you're writing that fanfiction, I mean, what format was that in? Were you writing a script or was it prose?
Ben Blacker: Oh, it was prose. As far as an assignment. I think we had to write a mystery, something like that. I don't know what the assignment was, but I was like, "I know what this needs. A healthy dose of ABC mystery drama."
Sarah Enni: Your teacher was like, "I like this, but what's happening?"
Ben Blacker: It must have been so strange for that teacher to be like, "What is this?" Cause fanfiction wasn't a thing yet either. Like, "What Is this kid doing?"
Sarah Enni: But isn't it funny how fanfiction is now, it's so mainstream we all kind of understand what it is. But some iteration of fanfiction has been early creative part of life for ever.
Ben Blacker: Absolutely. I mean I don't remember if Acker talked about this when he was on the podcast, but the first scripts we wrote together were Buffy the Vampire specs. Cause this was when you wanted to have the specs of an existing show, so you wrote that so people could see that you can write in the voice of another show. So we wrote two Buffy specs over the course of a weekend and they were basically fanfic.
One was, "What if the Buffy gang was at our coffee shop that we hung at in college? What if that happened?" And the other was a crazy way too big idea to put in a spec script, but we didn't know the rules. We just wanted to do it. And we knew these characters, and we loved these characters, and we could write their voices. And what we got out of it was writing together, which was clearly way better in most ways for both of us.
Sarah Enni: Well, I want to get to that. So creative writing. Did you go to school for it? Or when did it become something that you were really more serious about?
Ben Blacker: I always knew I wanted to write. I also was very pragmatic and thought like, "Well, that's not a living. I will probably teach and write novels." That was always the thing I expected to happen. And I taught for five years after college. I did go to school for, I wanted to do fiction writing and really literature study. And I went to Syracuse and they did not have a good undergrad literature department, but I was also interested in film. So I took film classes, which is where I met Acker.
And I transferred to Emerson in my last couple of years, where they did have good literature department and I took all those classes that I wanted to take.
Sarah Enni: I love that you found your way to it.
Ben Blacker: Yeah, I mean, I feel like I had exhausted the writing department. And they had great grad classes at Syracuse.
Sarah Enni: I was gonna say, the Syracuse MFA is a whole other thing.
Ben Blacker: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting. You kind of took a side-step into film out of necessity. I mean, were you writing short stories? Were you starting novels? Was that going on?
Ben Blacker: I started a lot of things in my twenties. I did take one creative writing class. I wish I can remember the teacher. She's a known novelist and she told me I would never be a writer [chuckles]. She's a great...Oh! Francine Prose is who it was (author of Reading Like a Writer: A Guide For People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them).
Sarah Enni: [Laughs out loud] Her book's on my nightstand right now!
Ben Blacker: She's terrific. I mean, she's a brilliant writer. And to hear that as a twenty-year-old, I was like, "Oh yeah, I'll show you!"
Sarah Enni: You know that's so funny. That's the kind of thing that would either evoke that response...
Ben Blacker: It could go either way.
Sarah Enni: Or, you're like, "I now knit for living."
Ben Blacker: Exactly. "You'll never be a knitter. You'll never be a professional knitter." But I remember for that class we had to turn in, it was either what we had been working on that whole year, or a series of stories, or something like that. And I had not finished anything that year. So I turned in a piece called Fear of Commitment, Nine Beginnings.
[Both laughing].
Ben Blacker: I remember the only person entertained by this was Acker. He and I thought it was so funny. And I do not remember what grade I got on that, but it could not have been good. But yeah, it took a long time to finish anything.
Sarah Enni: [Laughing] Well, I want to talk about the origin of writing with Ben. Were you trying scripts on your own at all? Or was it with Ben that you started to kind of get into scripts?
Ben Blacker: Well we did in college, you know, we were in film classes, we were in screenwriting classes together. And the reason I left the film school is I didn't want to make movies. I just wanted to write them. I didn't care about the other technical parts of it. And I had exhausted those classes.
So when I went to Emerson, I was still interested in it. So I took a TV writing class, which I loved. And it was run by a former writer for Roseanne who was doing this class. She was at Emerson for a year and she treated the class like a writer's room. So we all worked on our own script, but it was very collaborative. It was so much fun. I wrote a Mad About You spec, which was the first TV I had written.
And she liked it and she sent it to Paul Riser. And I got this lovely note saying , "This is really great. We already have a babysitter episode." This was at the end of the run, "but you know, please keep it up." Or something like that. Which was amazing to get.
Sarah Enni: Yeah! Francine versus Paul [laughs].
Ben Blacker: Right? I'll take Riser any day. Although Francine Prose was in Aliens, so [tsks]. I loved that class so much I took it again another semester and did a Dharma and Greg script. So I had been doing this. Meanwhile Acker had graduated and come out to LA and was working as an office PA on Will and Grace.
And he was being asked, they knew he wanted to write, he was being asked for scripts. And so he called me up and was like, "How do I do that?" And I said, "Oh, I just did these classes. I think I have a handle on it." So he came out to Boston and that's when we sat down for four days and wrote two Buffy specs.
Sarah Enni: Nice. Oh my god, I love that one long weekend.
Ben Blacker: Yeah, it really was. It was a lot of fun. And then shortly after that we sort of started sending stuff back and forth. It was just a natural progression from there.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I'm very interested in this because I think it's much more common in entertainment, or writing for TV or movies, to have a writing partner, as opposed to in book-world. There is some of it, but it's pretty rare. So I'm so interested in just the development of that, and finding your voice together. I mean how did that process kind of go?
Ben Blacker: I think early on we were filling gaps in each other's skill sets. He's a very big idea guy, and he's still tends to be, and I'm very structure oriented. And ironically now I love deadlines. I love finishing things. Cause I know when I finish something I get to do something else. I have a short attention span. So early on it was a lot of that and we had a shared sensibility. We liked the same stuff for the most part. And I think we each also brought other things to the party as far as influences.
Sarah Enni: Well, it's interesting that you were at Emerson studying the maybe technical elements of like, "Let's put a script together." Meanwhile Ben was out here just being on a set and learning a lot about that. Which means, I think, very complimentary and distinct skillsets.
Ben Blacker: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what drove us early on, but we never found one good way of working together. I think, you know, this was now twenty years ago, and we've had some gaps in between, but it's been pretty consistent since 2005 when we started Thrilling. And the thing we hit on broadly is, one of us will come to the other with an idea and if it's sticky, we work on that idea and start to break it down. Which is exactly what we did this week.
I pitched him a horror thing. He said, "That's bonkers, let's do it." And we spent four or five days breaking down the scenes, basically creating an outline together. But it's a messy outline. And then he's gone off to write the proper outline, a long prose piece that will turn into the script. Which the way we're working lately is one of us will shepherd a project and that way we can work on two or three things at the same time.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I was gonna say, you guys have, it seems like, a time management and a project management workflow basically, is what we're talking about. And I'm super interested in how that developed and just communication. A lot of my listeners are aspiring writers, which same for your podcast.
Ben Blacker: Yes, absolutely.
Sarah Enni: So I'd love anything. You know a lot about how other writers work too. So I'm interested in how you guys developed this communication style.
Ben Blacker: Yeah. I think the workflow was out of necessity. When we were doing Thrilling Adventure Hour, we did that show every month, a new eighty page script, for ten years. Yeah. That's a lot of pages!
Sarah Enni: I'm just now recognizing how intense eighty pages is. That is shocking.
Ben Blacker: It's a lot of work. And then a couple of weeks of producing the thing. So we got it to the point where we could write the script in about a week, week-and-a-half. But to back up from that, we would start the process by saying like, "We have three segments in this show. What are the actors we have? What pieces do we want to do?
Sarah Enni: Do you mind, just for purposes of this conversation, do you mind pitching Thrilling?
Ben Blacker: Absolutely. Thrilling Adventure Hour was a stage show in the style of old time radio that we did for ten years from 2005 to 2015. It's also a podcast that you can still find on iTunes. And it was made up of multiple segments. We always started with a Space Western called Sparks Nevada, Marshall on Mars. We always ended with our sort of Nick and Nora Thin Man, plus the supernatural called Beyond Belief. And then the middle segment changed out every month. We had a superhero spoof. We've had all kinds of silly pieces in there.
We had an amazing troop of ten to fifteen actors at any given time, that we both needed to serve and got to serve. And we had a lovely audience who let us keep doing this for a decade.
Sarah Enni: A ten year run at Largo is nothing to shake a stick at. That's pretty great.
Ben Blacker: No, it was a lot of fun until it became a lot of work. And even then it was a lot of fun. We did a show a couple of months ago and hadn't done it in over a year, maybe two years. And it was a blast getting back into the rhythm of it, and hanging out with everyone, and seeing them be these characters again, which they had done fifteen years ago now. Which is crazy nuts. We had our twenties and thirties with these people.
Sarah Enni: Right, right. Well, I want to hear how that kind of taps into workflow. I mean, when I think of Thrilling, I think of the fact that you sort of put yourself through a ten year MFA program.
Ben Blacker: We kind of did. I mean everything we learned about writing and producing, especially, we learned on that show. The writing was our learning curve, both in terms of what works and in terms of how to work together. Right? And it was basically a faster version of what we do now because that show gave us a deadline. We had to have those scripts for the actors at least a few days in advance.
So it was the same thing as, we'd sit down and say, "What stories do we want to do this time?" We knew we had our Space Western, we knew we had our Thin Man with ghosts, "What are we gonna put in the middle? What actors do we have to serve? And what stories do we want to tell?"
It became hard, especially towards the end, with Beyond Belief, which was much more stand alone. Sparks Nevada was always very serialized, so we could just have fun putting those actors and those characters behind eight balls. With Beyond Belief, it was like, "Ugh, what monster haven't we done?" We wrote so many of those that we were running out of ideas.
But we'd beat that out in a much looser way than we do now, where Ben and I sit in a coffee shop together, beat out the story for each segment. One of us would go off and write the first draft of each one, and those first drafts were pretty close to what the final draft was. Cause we knew the story beats. Part of the fun of having a writing partner is you get to surprise each other, even when the other person knows what's coming.
So that became the job of whoever was writing first drafts was like, "What great jokes can I put in here? What weird character moments? What surprising thing can I give to him, who knows the story already?"
Sarah Enni: And there's a couple of things that spring to mind when we're talking about this, which is I think something that maybe isn't talked about enough is when you're having this consistent deadline every month for ten years, it beats into, I would guess, that like, "Don't save anything."
Ben Blacker: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: Trust yourself that you'll have what you need next month.
Ben Blacker: Yeah. You tend not to be precious. And certainly we had ideas that we knew weren't ready, but we also knew they weren't ready. So we sat on them and waited until the moment was right when we could actually do it. And there are still ideas that we never got to do cause we couldn't quite crack what it was for the stage show.
But yeah, because that deadline is always looming you're like, "I have to write these twenty pages in three days. What do I throw in there? First thing? First thing that comes to my head?" [Laughs] Kind of was! But we were so practiced at it that that first thing tended to be okay. And we had amazing actors who could even make things that were okay, great.
Sarah Enni: But specifically though too, to people who are writing humor. I'm interested in how you feel about, talk about going through the paces, really learning what lands or what works. I think about this a lot cause I try to be funny in my books, but being funny in a novel is so different from when it's read out loud. So I'm interested in how you felt that developed?
Ben Blacker: It developed quickly. I think Ben and I knew what our voice was pretty early on, especially he had a very fully formed voice. There was a period when we weren't working together when I didn't live in LA, and he went through the UCB sketch writing program and I came back and saw the sketch show that he'd done. And so much of the humor in those sketches informed, especially early, Thrilling Adventure Hour.
So I think we knew what that was. Our first Thrilling show was not very funny. It was very theater of the mind and use your imagination. And we realized like, "Oh, we need to hear that people like this. Otherwise we're not gonna believe them, even if they tell us they like it." So we made a concerted effort to be much more straightforwardly comedy.
But I don't think we ever guessed about what would work. Like I said, we were writing to entertain each other and then writing to entertain the cast. And we figured if that worked then the audience will be entertained too.
Sarah Enni: Right. So, primarily the people who listen to this podcast are probably book writers or live in book-worlds. So I kind of would love, for someone who may not be as familiar with film and TV, the point of Thrilling was to get you guys other work.
Ben Blacker: Yeah, it was at a certain point, and then at a certain point it became the thing we do. It became our job.
Sarah Enni: Cause you and Ben have gone on to write many other things, but how did that kind of develop and what kinds of things have you gotten the opportunity to write?
Ben Blacker: It developed mostly through relationships, to be honest. The way we got our first managers was through Paul cause we knew him from working on the show. And we wrote a script with him and Paget Brewster, who was also on the show, with them in mind for the leads and they really liked it. So Paul brought it to his managers who said, "We'll produce this but we'd also to represent you." And that led us to our first agents.
So it all spread out from that. Through that process, we've sold about ten pilots over the years. We've been staffed on a couple of shows. I think the show most people would know that we were staffed on, was Supernatural. We were on season seven. It was a long time ago. But part of the reason we got that was, we didn't know anyone involved with it, we went for a straight meeting. And then asked a friend of ours who is a big TV writer who we met through Thrilling Adventure Hour, to put in a call for us. And he did. And that absolutely got us the job.
So it's a lot of stuff like that. People we met through Thrilling. I also do this podcast called The Writer's Panel where I talk to writers about the business and process of writing, mostly TV. So we've made a lot of connections that way. And they start to bleed over each other and into each other. But yeah, we've written a bunch of comics, and our first comics opportunity came from an editor at Marvel who liked Thrilling. And he put a video of himself singing one of our theme songs, playing ukulele and singing the Sparks Nevada theme on Twitter.
And so I got in touch with him. I was like, "This is crazy. Also, why aren't we writing comics?" And he said, "Oh, can you guys write things that aren't funny?" I was like, "Can we ever!" [Laughs] And he hired us to do this a hundred page Wolverine comic, which was an insane learning curve. To have that be the first thing you write in comics, which is a hard medium. Kind of every opportunity has grown out of Thrilling in some way or another.
Sarah Enni: Which is, you know, fascinating and also I don't think unusual. I think a lot of Los Angeles...that's why the advice of, "Just moved to LA" is there for a reason, right?
Ben Blacker: Well you form a community, right? And I think part of what drew people to Thrilling Adventure Hour, drew audience, was not just the show but that everybody really liked each other. There were twenty of us, basically, involved in this show and we all hung out. It was a fun time. And I think that came across on stage and it came across in the podcast, and I think people wanted to be a part of that. And they were just by showing up, just by listening to it.
And I think that taught us a lot about networking. Networking can be such an ugly word, but it doesn't have to be an ugly practice. It just means hanging out with people you like, who make things that you like, which Ben and I both do. We get opportunities to meet people who work in other media, or people who work in the same medium, and get to know them and talk about being creative, and their process. Or how hard it is for whatever, or how terrible notes are.
And that's networking, but we like to think of it as creating a community.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. I've gone off on this many times on this show, but I think people call it networking when they're scared of it and they want to hate it. And it's like, "Well..."
Ben Blacker: There's some of that, and I think people who don't understand it too. I think there's an instinct to network up, which I absolutely understand, and I do that too. But it always comes from a place of like, "I like that thing you do, and I want to know how you do it." And I created an excuse for me to talk to those people with The Writer's Panel, but that's also led to friendships. But I think there's something to be said for networking at your own level.
Sarah Enni: Oh yeah. Peers are super important.
Ben Blacker: Yeah. And way more valuable, I think. We're all coming up together, so we're all in the same boat. We have this shared experience. Let's compare notes. Let's commiserate. Let's celebrate each other.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love that. Well, thank you. I appreciate dipping into something that you did a while ago, but it's still hanging around in some form or another.
Ben Blacker: It is, and it won't go away.
Sarah Enni: I'm glad. I want to talk about, I actually want to take a quick step and talk about comics because when I was listening to your interview on The Stacks, you told Traci that in some ways you kind of always wanted to write comics and it just took a decade to get there.
Ben Blacker: Absolutely. Over a decade. I don't know why I always saw myself as writing comics for a living. And I think it would've been easier twenty years ago. But I'm glad I've gotten to do some of it. I remember even, I think I was eighteen, nineteen, submitting a story to an editor at DC Comics for a character, like a Flash spinoff that I liked. And I got a lovely note again saying like, "This is a fun idea. We're not looking for anything right now." Or, "We have other plans." Or something. "All right." That kind of rejection is only encouraging to me.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Oh totally. And something that's on a DC stationary or Marvel stationary, you're like, "Great! That's all I wanted."
Ben Blacker: Exactly, yeah, I always liked the medium and I felt like I had internalized how that kind of storytelling works.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, it's very different.
Ben Blacker: It is different. It's kind of between prose and script. It's interesting.
Sarah Enni: And part of the reason why I'm so interested is a good friend of mine just got the chance to write her first one.
Ben Blacker: Nice!
Sarah Enni: So I was looking over her pages and I was like, "Wow!" You know, going from prose to this where she was like, "You know, you have to describe the panel." I mean, I'd love actually just for you to describe what it's like as a writer. You're not the illustrator. But you really determine what the book's gonna look like.
Ben Blacker: The best advice that Ben and I got about this was when we did that Wolverine book, however long ago - 2010, I think it came out in 2012 - something like that. And we were lucky enough to know Len Wein when he was alive and Len created Wolverine.
Sarah Enni: Oh, no big deal! [Laughs].
Ben Blacker: Yeah. He, I mean, he created Swamp Thing. He created thousands of characters at Marvel and DC, he was an editor at DC for years. He edited the Watchman books. He was the Forrest Gump of comics. He helped create Comicons. So we were really lucky to know Len, and when we got this, we were like, "Len, how do we write comics?"
And his advice was writing comics is like looking at a film strip and picking out the frame that best tells the story, and describing that frame while still leaving room for your artist to work. And I think that we got from Ed Brubaker also, who's an amazing comic book writer. I think it was Ed who said like, "Your script is just a letter to your artist." So, however you want to frame it.
Sarah Enni: That's kind of a sweet way to think about it.
Ben Blacker: It really is. And it's what I did I think when I was on The Stacks, I was talking about Hex Wives. It's really how I thought of that since I knew who my artist would be and we were in it together from the beginning. I could tailor everything to her and ask Mirka, "What do you like in a script? What do you want to draw? What do you not want to draw?"
She was Italian and she speaks great English, but she will tell you her English is not great. But there were American idioms, because the book took place in a sort of 1950 suburb in America, that she didn't have. So giving her references for that, and stuff like that.
So that letter to the artist was really helpful, and Len's advice of describing that frame. That's the work of it. And that's really hard.
Sarah Enni: I hadn't realized before how much, even in prose in a novel format, you're describing a moving thing, it feels fluid. And then in comics it's... no.
Ben Blacker: It's this frame is this. The biggest error we see in comic scripts from new writers is putting two actions in one frame because it's your instinct, you're used to movement. And this is a weird, not that.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Do you want to pitch Hex Wives is really cute...or really fast.
Ben Blacker: I'll pitch it cute.
[Both laughing].
Ben Blacker: Hex Wives is adorable [laughs]. Hex Wives is Bewitched plus the Stepford Wives. It's about a bunch of powerful witches who find themselves not knowing what they are, trapped in this suburban housewife life and the way they find their way out of that.
Sarah Enni: Am I right that you wrote that on your own?
Ben Blacker: I did. It was a story I'd wanted to tell for a few years as I saw what was happening in the world and the evils of the patriarchy becoming clearer. And the systematic oppression and danger inherent in that patriarchy becoming clearer started to form around my love of TV. I used to come home from school and watch Bewitched. I loved that show because I loved Elizabeth Montgomery.
Sarah Enni: She's the best.
Ben Blacker: Right? And it was not a good show. It was so dumb. It was the same every time. But using that, and I hadn't really had a chance to write horror either, which is a real love of mine. Ben and I got to do comedy horror in Thrilling, but I wanted to do some real horror, that stuff that scared me. So yeah, all of that sort of went into Hex Wives and after DC said they wanted to do it, I went to Ben and I said, "Do you want to be a part of this?" And he said, "It seems you have a good handle on it. I'm happy to be there if you want me, but if you don't go try it."
And it was so much harder doing it on my own. Breaking story was hard. I mean that's the part where we really lean on each other, and it's why you have a writer's room, is to break story. Luckily I had amazing editors on Hex Wives, Molly Mann and Maggie Howell, who let me do that with them. I would go into the DC office and just throw ideas around and they really helped form that story.
Sarah Enni: It was so interesting to me that it's a whole different format and you got to kind of try something on your own. But in a lot of ways it's still very collaborative.
Ben Blacker: Absolutely.
Sarah Enni: As you were saying, working with the illustrator and all that stuff.
Ben Blacker: Part of why I love comics is it has the collaboration of TV or film, but the immediacy of novel writing. There are so few collaborators and everything you do doesn't have to go through a million hoops. I had this incredible conversation with my colorist after one or two issues where she explained what she was doing with color. I was like, "Why is this book so beautiful? What are you doing?"
And we did it on a podcast that's still out there, but we talked for ninety minutes and she broke down how coloring works. Marissa Louise is her name and she's still working on a bunch of books. There's so much artistry in that craft that I was totally unaware of that helps make it what it is. And the fact that I could just talk to her instead of having a meeting between departments was really important and, again, part of the fun of comics.
Sarah Enni:
I love that, I'll find that podcast and link to it in the show notes.
Ben Blacker: It's Comic Book Commentary.
Sarah Enni: Okay. I've been talking to a lot of graphic novelists and even picture book artists recently. And just like you're saying, "How... the thing." I don't understand even where to begin to ask questions about that stuff.
Ben Blacker: Folks who listen to Comic Book Commentary. I started this podcast last year. We just did it for 2019 but every week a new comic book, mostly writers, some artists, doing a commentary track on an issue of their comic.
Sarah Enni: Oh, my gosh. That's awesome.
Ben Blacker: It was really fun.
Sarah Enni: I couldn't exactly find the origin date for The Writer's Panel. When did you start that show?
Ben Blacker: Oh my gosh, so long ago, 2012 or 2013 they started coming out.
Sarah Enni: iTunes says 300 episodes and I was like, "That's not all of them at all."
Ben Blacker: No. We're closing in on 500.
Sarah Enni: Wow!
Ben Blacker: I think it'll be early next year we get to 500, and then I will be done.
Sarah Enni: Oh, and then you're gonna call it at 500?
Ben Blacker: I don't know, I'm floating this right now on your podcast, but it's something I've been thinking about. But I do love doing them. Basically in The Writer's Panel, like I said, I talk to writers mostly of TV about the business and process of writing TV.
And I love having the conversations. It's usually a round table conversation. It's three writers and me. And even if we talk about the same things every time, they're always different stories. Everybody has their unique experience. So it's always interesting to me. I always learn from it and I'm always inspired by it too.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, it's an amazing resource for anybody who's interested in writing TV. I just spoke with Maggie Levin, she's last week's guest and she's this week's guest for The Writer's Panel, which was very cool. But she was just saying that basically she read thousands of scripts and then listened to Writer's Panel and that she got so much information from it.
Ben Blacker: It's been funny doing it for however long, eight years now, where I'm now at a generation of writers who listened to it coming up, which is crazy to me. Because it's always been this lark and it's been a fun thing to do. And I started doing them as live panels to benefit 826LA, and then the live ones just became too hard to book. So now I go to the studio a couple of times a month and I knock them out.
But when I started it was mostly talking to people who made TV I love and asking, "How did you do that?" And you can hear Acker and my career trajectory on The Writer's Panel by what questions I'm asking. Cause in the beginning it was like, "What kind of sample should I write? How do I have a meeting?" And then it was distinctly like, "What is the first week on a job like?" And then, "What do you do when you get fired?" Stuff about development when we were selling pilots, you can really hear me asking practical questions for us. Now, the past few years, I tend to have writers of all different levels cause I'm finding those conversations really interesting.
So I had Maggie, who had just written and directed her first feature. But I also had a showrunner who's run three shows and came up since Gossip Girl. So those conversations among people who are essentially peers but with all different levels of experience, has been really fun for me.
Sarah Enni: That, in particular, was a fun episode. Him being like, "I'm so tired." [Laughing].
Ben Blacker: [Laughs] Yes, I hear that so often and it makes me a little afraid to be a showrunner but also like, "Well I'm not gonna be like that."
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Of course, of course.
Ben Blacker: I do recommend, if people are looking for a jumping on one, that is brand new. Mark Frost, the co-creator of Twin Peaks, Stephen Canals the co-creator of Pose, and Harley Peyton who was a writer on Twin Peaks and has done a ton of other stuff, is an incredible conversation.
Hearing Mark Frost and Stephen Canals admire each other's work thirty years apart, is really cool. The line drawn between Twin Peaks and Pose and what each does for TV. Which is where the conversations have been in the past few years of, how the industry is changing. When I started this, Netflix was not making original programming.
Sarah Enni: Well no! I mean it's really wild. And I had this thought where, and I'm not caught up on the back end of it, but I was like, "I don't know if it's helpful to listen to people talk about TV in 2014 because that doesn't exist anymore."
Ben Blacker: I've been rereleasing a lot of the old episodes because I think they are really interesting snapshots of TV at a certain time. I just put one out with Carlton Cuse (LOST, and Bates Motel), Mike Shur (who got his start on The Office and then created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, and The Good Place) and J.J. Philbin (New Girl, creator of Single Parents). And Mike had just, I think he was in the middle of Parks and Rec and was about to launch Brooklyn 99, that might've still been a few years away. Carlton was on the other side of Lost, and then J.J. was a staff writer on New Girl and now she's a creator of a Single Parents.
So hearing these people at this point in their career and where TV was, where there really was the beginning of basic cable. So Carlton was interested in, after Lost, what opportunities are out there? And what can I get away with on say FX or AMC or whatever. And Mike had worked on a show, The Office, that helped change what comedy was. So what does that guy do next?
I don't know. It was an interesting conversation. So I'm putting out those older ones every once in awhile, for the next couple of months anyway, here and there.
Sarah Enni: I like that. And I want to hear about just the inspiration for starting it. I mean, you and Ben starting Thrilling as a podcast was so ahead of its time, truly. And then same can be said for The Writer's Panel. There's a lot of shows about that stuff now, but you have been going since 2012. You have a backlog to be admired.
Ben Blacker: And I think the reason I could do it then was no one was talking to writers yet. When I started, or when it really took off after the first year or two, was when I had Vince Gilligan on, which is the beginning of that showrunner auteur idea. As much as he credits his room with everything.
So yeah, I think that's how I got away with it. Nobody was asking writers to talk. That's how I had Damon Lindelof on my first show, was no one was clamoring for him cause Lost was still, as huge as it was, just a sci-fi show. It was a weird time that's hard to imagine now where every showrunner is being heralded.
Sarah Enni: That was pre recap culture. Now you can go on Vulture and people are just as engaged on the back end of something as they are in the actual show itself. I mean Marc Evan Jackson hosting the podcast about The Good Place running simultaneous with The Good Place, it's de rigueur now. But it's also when you step back and look at it, it's like, "That's kind of crazy." People are just that interested in how it gets made.
Ben Blacker: And I think that's a lucky thing that I stumbled into. That's all I was interested in. I'm the guy who watches DVD commentaries. And that's all I was doing, was asking the questions that I wanted answers to, which is really about how the things are made. And I was lucky enough that other people were interested too. Whether they were other writers, which was a large portion of the audience, or they're the kind of people who watch DVD extras, they like the behind the scenes stuff. They want to know how Bones is made, you know?
So that I stumbled into just by being a fan of TV.
Sarah Enni: And the reason it's so interesting to me is because obviously I feel the same.
Ben Blacker: And I think there's a lot of us who are creative, are also process nerds. I'll watch any cooking show. I'll watch any documentary about making food. Cause it's something I understand. So I can appreciate the nuance of it. And I feel the same way about a writing podcast, or whatever it is. I don't think I could watch someone paint for an hour, even if they talked me through it.
Sarah Enni: And can you talk about Dead Pilots Society?
Ben Blacker: Here's another thing I do. [Both Laughing] I wonder why I don't have any time. And then someone asks me about each of these things in turn and I'm like, "Duh, that's why I don't have any time!" Dead Pilots Society is a live show and podcast created by Andrew Reich (writer for Friends and Worst Week), who was a Friend's writer and he's written for a bunch of shows. He, and his partner at the time, had something like thirteen or fifteen pilots that they sold, comedy pilots that they sold, that never got made.
And he was like, "This is a shame that I never get to see the table read. I never get to cast actors. I never get to hear this." So he, as a onetime thing, did one of his pilots, and one of another friend's writer, I believe. And they just did a table read with actors that he kind of knew and had been working with. And he invited me to come cause he thought he would make it a regular thing. And he knew that between The Writers' Panel and Thrilling Adventure Hour, I knew a lot of writers and I knew a lot of actors.
Sarah Enni: And you can produce something.
Ben Blacker: Exactly. So I joined up with him and shortly thereafter we put the podcast on the Maximum Fun Network and we've been doing it since. We do live shows pretty much every quarter or so, a little more at all different venues around Los Angeles. We get great actors to read these scripts that otherwise would never get heard. So foremost for me it's for the writers. Ben and I had one of our scripts read, and it was so much fun getting to hear this thing that had only lived on the page before.
We also get these incredible actors to come do this, as we did with Thrilling. Where people are just happy to come, especially if they're not actors who work in comedy a lot, or get to do live comedy a lot. To just come and be on stage and get laughs and work with other actors on a fun, easy thing.
Sarah Enni: I was gonna say, there's something that I can only imagine a low stakes, immediate gratification. If you're an actor, you hear 'no' so much. I think there's a lot of stress on the stuff you do day-to-day and getting the chance to just go do something and put fun into it must be a dream.
Ben Blacker: Totally. And that's fun for us. Often the scripts are great and there's always a story about why they don't get made.
Sarah Enni: And it's another process thing, right? The stories about how it doesn't get made. I love that stuff. And the chance to hear, well, this brings us to scripted audio, which you invented.
Ben Blacker: Which Ben and I invented.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] So let's talk about Cut + Run. I want to hear the pitch for the show before we get into more details.
Ben Blacker: Cut + Run is a lighthearted dark comedy about best friends who are kidney thieves and the havoc that wreaks on their respective relationships.
Sarah Enni: It's an audible Original, which means it's kind like one of the fiction podcasts but shorter, I dunno.
Ben Blacker: Yeah, I dunno. It's so hard to explain. audible is doing full cast readings of original material. So it's just a scripted podcast, but it's not every week or anything. You get three hours, which is a complete story at one time because what they do is audio books. That's how they know how to release things. So if you have an audible account, you can make it one of your choices for that month or whatever. If you don't have an audible account, you can still get it and I think it's $9 or something.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Which is how I got it. Downloaded it super fast and it's a third of the length of a full book, which is great.
Ben Blacker: And much funnier.
Sarah Enni: It truly was much funnier than a lot of the audio books I've been listening to.
Ben Blacker: The cast is ridiculous. They're just a pleasure to listen to.
Sarah Enni: Truly. And we'll get to it, but Darcy and Sam were like, I was scaring my cat laughing while washing dishes this morning. It was so funny. It has kind of a long run up, this script. So do you mind kind of giving us the history?
Ben Blacker: The short version is, this is a pilot script, which is basically the first half hour of the audio version, and is something Ben and I wrote in 2007. And it is the script that I mentioned before that we wrote for Paul and Paget. We had them in mind for the leads. And it was based on a sketch that Ben had done at UCB about this guy's worst day and it was getting his kidney stolen.
What came out of that was the doctor and the con artist characters were such a funny and engaging friendship and we wanted to explore that. So we wrote the script. It sold to a studio. Two days after the contracts closed was the writer's strike. So we'd never got to shop it around, but we got passes on it cause it was being sent out, which was very weird. It became our sample that went out for staffing, or development, or whatever, that people really responded to. We got a lot of, "I love this script. What else can you do? What can we do that's not as gross?" I'm like... Dexter was on the air, so I don't know how people thought this was too gross.
But I think because it is so lighthearted that they didn't expect the kidney stealing to be, like that contrast was a lot for people.
Sarah Enni: Okay. This is interesting cause what you're talking about is tone. I do think that you guys have a very specific, when you write together, have a very specific voice and tone. And I'm interested in how it's been to explain that to people? Or, I don't know, how do you kind of work with that?
Ben Blacker: It's hard to explain. And it's part of why we were a mystery to even our representatives for a long time, because the stuff that we write didn't really exist in the world until the past few years. Now it's all different, which is really great. We saw that first season of Fargo, or later seasons of Breaking Bad, and we're like, "This is what we do. It's dark. But it's funny. It has real characters who don't tell jokes but have wit about them."
So Weeds, very early on, was an inspiration and a comparison. Cause I think Jenji (Jenji Kohan. Aide note, I really loved the Emily Nussbaum feature profile about Jenji featured in The New Yorker and her book, I Like to Watch) does a similar thing, and she was very lucky that she started in traditional sitcoms and then Weeds took off. So people understood what she did. And I think if we were smarter or had smarter agents, we could have framed ourselves that way. But unfortunately we did not.
Acker keeps saying in meetings, and I think he's absolutely right, that we're living in a golden age of tone. You kind of get to be anything right now. And the more specific, the more interesting it tends to be. And I think that's seeped over from film where you can have Edgar Wight (Baby Driver) and you can have Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), which are wildly different and both fascinating, and Rian Johnson (Knives Out).
And Little Women is revelatory for me cause it's putting Greta Gerwig's tone on a thing that exists already, an existing IP. Which I guess Fargo did too, although he was copping Coen Brothers a little. Now, the rules are out the window.
Sarah Enni: Well Rian Johnson directed a Star Wars.
Ben Blacker: And it was still Rian Johnson movie.
Sarah Enni: It's wild. And Knives Out is a great example of what you're saying. I keep bringing it up on the podcast recently, it is the movie I didn't realize was impacting me so much. But it was so funny. It was so of the moment. It was so smart. And it's what you're saying, you know, he had that script for ten years. It's like, "Well yeah." It took until now for people to be like, "I think we'll take a chance on it."
Ben Blacker: Rian directed a couple episodes of Thrilling over the years and when we first met him he was just talking about that script. It was a vague idea that he wanted to do an Agatha Christie style drawing room mystery. And we're like, "We could help." And he's like, "No.That's not how I work." [Laughs]
Sarah Enni: [Laughing] Oh my God. That's so funny. But yeah, thank you for taking that side step into that. It's always so interesting to me. And especially because it's this magic third thing that when you and Ben write together, it becomes this... whatever it is.
Ben Blacker: Yeah. Whatever comes out is the collection of both of our individual and collective interests and influences. And you know, also serving the thing that we're doing. We could write Supernatural, we were able to do that, but it's not what we sound left to our own devices. And luckily there's a world where we can do that.
Sarah Enni: Right. The other reason this is so interesting is that on the recent episode of Writer's Panel where you spoke with the two writers who helped you on Cut + Run, you were talking about being like, "Who can imitate us? Or who can like seamlessly...
Ben Blacker: We didn't realize how weird our writing was until we needed other people to do it. And we had some other writers contribute to Thrilling over the years. And that was when we figured out... and they were great, right? Len Wein did it. David Fury wrote something, and Brubaker wrote something we had great writers contributing, but they were never quite our voice. And we're like, "Oh, this isn't as easy as we think it is. It's easy for us cause it's us."
So when we got to hire a staff for Cut + Run, not only were we looking for funny people, but people who found the same kind of thing funny. And I think they did more than we could ever have come up with. Those two, it was Humphrey Ker and Katie Wood, were incredible and they made jokes that we never would have thought of.
Sarah Enni: And I'll link to that episode because hearing you guys talk about it was really instructive and very cool. I'm not gonna make you repeat the whole conversation now, but people should definitely listen to that. But I think I cut you off mid-story. So you had this script.
Ben Blacker: Oh, right. So yes.
Sarah Enni: It was your calling card.
Ben Blacker: So it kind of became our sample. Yeah, it was our calling card. People liked it. In 2017, the Wondery podcast network started up and an executive who had been in comedy at Fox went over to run their scripted division. And he remembered Cut + Run and he said, "I think this would be a great audio series." And they gave us a little budget and that's when we hired Humphrey and Katie. And we had a little writer's room where we wrote six episodes. And then that executive left Wondery and they decided they only wanted to concentrate on their documentary stuff. So they gave it back to us, which was great. That was very nice.
And then we had three hours of script and nothing to do with it. So we shopped it around a little bit and it was a little too expensive for most people. This was, 2018 was a shift in podcasting, where people were starting to discover it and throw some money into it. But it was all very tentative. And there hadn't been great podcast success in narrative. So through a fluke it wound up in the hands of audibles, through a friend of ours. He was sent the pilot, the audio version of the pilot, and he said, "This is great. Is there more of it?"
Sarah Enni: I think the connection is Janet Varney, is that right?
Ben Blacker: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Cause I got to talk to her for the show too. So I'll just plug that episode. You can hear Janet talk about Sketchfest.
Ben Blacker: Yeah, so it was for a Sketchfest. They basically do a Dead Pilots but with feature films. And they do stage readings. So Janet had come to us to say, "Do you have any dead features?" And we said, "No, but we have this thing which is already audio. Do you want to do that?" And so she sent it along and they said, "We don't want to do that. We want to make that our next audible Original."
And they fast tracked it after that, which was great cause everything was done. And their overwhelming note was, "Don't make it episodic. These should be chapters.That's how we do stuff. We'll release it all at once." So Acker did a little polish of it, sort of cutting off the ends and cleaning it up. And that's the only difference from the 2017 version pretty much.
Sarah Enni: Which is wild. So then that was when you got green lit by audible, that was 2018?
Ben Blacker: It was the end of 2018, beginning of 2019. So it was January last year, everything was wrapped up and then the idea was for us to record over the summer.
Sarah Enni: It's just so funny and cool to think of writing something in 2017 and then a year and change later. It's like, "Oh, all of a sudden we get to work on this thing."
Ben Blacker: It's the fastest anything has ever happened for us. In 2017, we sold a movie and a TV show and it took a year for both of those contracts to close, and then they fizzled out. With Cut + Run, now granted we wrote in 2007 [laughs] but once audible got on board, it was really fast, which was great. And the cast sort of fell together.
We had lists of maybe four or five names for each character. You know, they had a real budget to work with, so they said, "Shoot for the stars." But we pointedly did not want to use any Thrilling Adventure Hour people because we wanted to write for some different people. Even though it was written, we wanted to tailor it for different actors. We wanted to have experience working with actors that we couldn't shorthand with, so we could learn from that a little bit (The cast of CUT + RUN is amazing and includes: Meg Ryan, Sam Richardson, D’Arcy Carden, Rachel Bloom (listen to the episode of The Writer’s Panel where Ben sat down with Rachel and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna), Ed Begley, Jr.).
Sarah Enni: Interesting, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Ben Blacker: But like I said, most everyone came from our collection, our network. I mean it was basically between Thrilling and then Dead Pilots Society. Meg Ryan came from audible. They had been talking to her about something else and said when we were looking for a narrator, I think it was Acker who said like, "This is at heart a romantic comedy, so let's get a romantic comedy person and who better than Meg Ryan?"
Sarah Enni: The queen.
Ben Blacker: And that she did it was amazing. And she's so good. She's just so charming.
Sarah Enni: It's also very, yeah, charming is such the perfect word. And as a narrator, there's a certain thing about narration that is just soothing. You're like, "Oh, I'm in good hands. Meg Ryan wouldn't lead me astray." I think she says as much at the top of the show.
Ben Blacker: Yeah! That's totally it. You want someone you can trust. Does she? I've not listened to it. But you do want someone you can trust, right? I don't like, in prose, a narrator with a personality unless it's a first person narration. I don't like an omniscient narrator with a personality cause it tends to be a little cute. I love it in audio. Because it could be very dry otherwise.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's such an interesting distinction. I'm pausing on it too because I just talked to a woman who writes middle-grade and we were talking about fairy tales and how there is some comfort in the remove because you feel like you're being told a story. It's like The Princess Bride (and why not link to the book, written by famous screenwriter William Goldman). type of thing where the construct is part of that kind of storytelling. But you're right, it can get really cute and almost [unintelligible] at some point. But in audio, it feels like you really need someone to keep it moving and connect with you.
Ben Blacker: Yeah. You need that connection. I think that's the exact right word. It's so easy to lose the train of thought in audio.
Sarah Enni: I really want to ask you about this cause this is a kind of an ineffable thing that I have trouble figuring out why it is that I have such a great attention span for long nonfiction when it comes to audio. But fiction can be tough. This, what you guys wrote, was not hard.
Ben Blacker: I'm glad!
Sarah Enni: It really did work.
Ben Blacker: But it could have been. And I think we talk about this on the podcast with Humphrey and Katie too, is you're both allowed - and it's a terrible trap in scripted audio, especially comedy, and especially the way we write - to have these long digressions. For example, the multi-world role-playing game based on The West Wing, but with supernatural elements [laughing].
Sarah Enni: And his story about that was beyond.
Ben Blacker: It was so good! I did not realize. Oh, people should go listen to that.
Sarah Enni: You have to listen to that.
Ben Blacker: But that joke was so funny, and he wrote a page digression that you can only do in audio, but it's such a balancing act, right? Cause you want to keep the story moving. And you want to keep people interested and not just hearing the cadence of voices. Right? And I think it's something we learned and it just became easy for us because of Thrilling, that storytelling through character, and that storytelling through not just dialogue but character driven dialogue, which look... that's any good writing. You're gonna apply that to any script. But in audio I think you have to be more selective about the kind of language you use.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I mean, you can get as granular as you want about this cause this is really interesting to me, but there's also an element of pacing, right? Because I haven't written for TV or film, but the sense I get is that it's pretty rigid. It's just got to move. And there's a little bit more room when you're talking about, I mean that's why I have a podcast that can go on for two hours, I love having room to breathe, I write novels. So that feels like maybe you get a little bit more breathing room?
Ben Blacker: Yeah. I mean, I think this is a conversation that Acker and I had a lot in Thrilling and I think it just came naturally when we applied it to Cut + Run. Which is, you have to give the audience a chance to rest. You can't just give them a barrage of both information, and character, and jokes, and stories, right? They need a chance to rest. Which is why we had theme songs in Thrilling.
You gave their brains a chance to adjust to a different kind of being entertained. And I think that's what the narrator does in Cut + Run. Even though Meg Ryan is giving you information, she's doing it in a much more straight forward way. As much as she's a character, she's the character of Meg Ryan. It's something you know and are familiar with so there's nothing to learn there. So it's almost like putting a song in.
Sarah Enni: I want to ask since this is something that I haven't been able to do before, obviously we know the script was written, then you got to cast it. But then I'm curious when you know it's going to be a D'Arcy Carden and when you know it's gonna be Thomas Lennon, did you do a pass on the dialogue? Did you reframe any of the characters knowing who was gonna be coming in?
Ben Blacker: Not in a major way. We were lucky enough that you get someone like D'Arcy who can do anything. I mean, if we had known her in 2005 she would have been in Thrilling Adventure Hour, a regular player. She's that kind of performer who, our friend Mark Jackson says that someone hears the music of comedy and that is absolutely true of D'Arcy. She gets it. And so she was actually the last person recorded. She didn't record until October of last year and everyone else was done in the summer. And she knocked it out in a day.
She was having trouble with some of the Spanish, cause it takes place in Mexico. So there's a bunch of Spanish in there. And we said, "You know, we can change it." Like, "We'll either do it with the narration or there are ways to cover it." And she was like, "No, no, I'll learn it." And she did the homework. And we brought in a friend of ours, a another writer named Carlos Folio, who sat in the booth with her and fed her the lines when she needed them. And she just repeated and killed it. it came out flawless. So yeah, the actors were all so good that we didn't have to rewrite it very much at all.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. I mean, were there any liberties taken? I'm also compelled by just the fact that you had so much experience with Thrilling about wanting to give autonomy to these people who breathe life into the characters. So I'm so interested in how that...
Ben Blacker: Yeah, it's funny. And before I say this, I am not accusing you of doing this. But people would always ask how much of Thrilling was improvised? And the answer was none. The reason you hire good actors is cause they make everything sound spontaneous. And that was always true of Thrilling. And that was always true of Cut + Run. They're just that good. I don't think we've found anything in the room. We may have, a joke here and there. I don't think they made them into the final piece. I think it really was as scripted.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing.
Ben Blacker: It's kinda crazy.
Sarah Enni: It's wild. Because there's also a lot of interplay and tight dialogue and I know that not everyone was able to be in the room at the same time. So it's really impressive that it came together so seamlessly.
Ben Blacker: That was the big thing we were worried about is the dialogue is so fast and it's all about chemistry. And D'Arcy and Sam were never in the room together.
Sarah Enni: Which is wild!
Ben Blacker: It's crazy. But they're both so good. When D'Arcy came in, she didn't even get to listen to his audio. But they do know each other and so she knows what Sam brings to it. She knows how things are delivered. And we would get notes occasionally from audible who was editing as we went, to help sub-performances anywhere to match the other performances. But that was rare. They were very instinctual about it.
Sarah Enni: That's very cool. And then there was a video of Sam and Rachel playing Operation which I think you tweeted.
Ben Blacker: It was our dumb idea, cause audibles, look, they're a tech company and they have their marketing people who do a very good job. But we were like, "Well, we know these actors are so fun and so charming. Let us write a list of questions for them and we'll do that." So we did one where we had them talk about Meg Ryan movies. And I'll have to get the longer cut of it, but they're talking about their favorite Meg Ryan movies and then Rachel goes, "Oh, Meg Ryan's in this!" [Laughs] It's so funny. And then we thought, "What would be really fun? What's a physical thing they could do? Let's have them play Operation." And so the two of them playing Operation is so silly.
Sarah Enni: It just devolves into madness. Rachel it's just like a blood bath.
Ben Blacker: It just makes her crazy. It makes her lose her mind.
Sarah Enni: But it was so delightful and especially those two because they're so cute together in the show. And it's like, "Oh well that's them."
Ben Blacker: They had a great chemistry. I think they did get maybe a day together in the studio outside of when we shot that stuff to actually record. But maybe not. I don't know. It was rare that we had anyone together. I know the two we did have together and, to me, you can tell the difference. I'm sure no one else can. It was Carlos Ellis Rocky and Baron Vaughn played FBI agents and when the two of them are talking to Tom Lennon's character and introducing themselves, they have such a funny chemistry to me that I want to write a spinoff for those two guys.
Sarah Enni: I think I did read that somewhere where your approach to having all the characters be fully rounded, was I would like for any given character to be able to spin off into their own world.
Ben Blacker: We came to that early on and I think it came from something Ben heard when Deadwood was on. Was all of those characters were so fully formed, even these tertiary characters that anyone could carry his own episode or a spinoff or whatever, and that's something we really took to heart and we try to apply to everything.
Sarah Enni: I think that's fantastic advice. And a friend of mine, Andrew T, who's writing on...
Ben Blacker: Oh, I know Andrew. Andrew's doing our next Dead Pilot Society.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Ben Blacker: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: That's awesome. His pilot? Or he's gonna be in it?
Ben Blacker: He's gonna be in it.
Sarah Enni: That's awesome. He just pointed out to me when I was trying to write a pilot, he was like, "Just keep in mind if this were to get produced, the character who plays the walk-on that has two lines, is gonna spend a day." You know, they're gonna memorize it, they're gonna spend a day committed to it. They're gonna be dressed as it, this person's going to bring everything to this character. So you should at least think about it.
Ben Blacker: Yeah, that's absolutely true. That's really good advice.
Sarah Enni: So Cut + Run is amazing. Everyone should go listen to it. It's super funny. Especially right now. I was like, "Can I please just listen to something funny. What else are you guys working on?
Ben Blacker: Ah, nothing I can tell you about? We're out trying to sell Cut + Run as a TV show.
Sarah Enni: Oh, cool.
Ben Blacker: We've had some interest, which is really exciting and crazy after thirteen years. But there's IP now, which is what excites people. And we would love to keep as much as our cast as we can, but that's all someone else's conversation. So yeah, we're out with that, pitching it around to see if anyone wants to bite. We're out with a couple of other pitches.
Sarah Enni: I'm interested in, you and Ben have been working together for awhile now and you have, I've seen ideas come and go and take many different iterations. You guys seem to be very willing and adroit at taking something and just flipping it and being open to putting it in a new format or whatever. I don't think everybody is that flexible.
Ben Blacker: No. And he and I have talked about this a little bit, that we have so many ideas, we're never gonna get to do them all. So let's execute the ones we can. Let's try to get to the next ones, but let's try to do as much as we can as quickly as we can for anyone who will pay us to do them, in whatever form. I think sometimes a story tells you what it is. Like Hex Wives was always a comic to me. It was never going to be anything else. Now it could be something else, now that I've gotten to do the comic.
But that Cut + Run can be TV, and can be audio, and could be a movie, or could be TV again. And we have movie scripts that we are pitching as comic books, and we have TV scripts that we are pitching as audio. The form almost doesn't matter. First of all, cause we like writing. We like doing all of it. We like working together, we like breaking story, and we like writing scripts. And we work fast cause there are two of us. We're efficient in that way.
But the other thing is get your story out however you can, whatever way makes the most sense. I started writing a novel fifteen years ago, something like that, that I got halfway through and had to abandon because I was so busy with other things, that Ben and I are now talking about using as turning it into a TV script.
The ideas are there. It's a thing that our agent responded to, who we run all the ideas by like, "This makes sense for you guys. It's a different tone, but you get away with that tone now. Go do that." Like, "Why not? We know who the characters are. We know what the world is." There's no reason to be precious about anything.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I mean I guess that's what I find inspiring about hearing you and Ben talk about stuff you do, is just be open to opportunities that come along.
Ben Blacker: And also enjoy the process. That's what it comes down to. And I think if I've learned nothing else in ten years of doing The Writer's Panel, is so much is out of our control that all we can do is our best on the thing we can control, which is the writing.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. Well, is there anything else that you like to talk about?
Ben Blacker: Oh, god no!
Sarah Enni: I love to wrap up with advice. I would love to ask for advice for people who want to maybe write with someone. How do you know if you could write well with someone? I can imagine there must be awkward moments, communication foibles. How do you kind of work through that?
Ben Blacker: We have one role. First of all, as far as finding someone to write with, when it works, it works. And you know. I mean it's like falling in love is you find the person who works for you. And it might not be the best person on paper, but it's the person who works with you and for you.
But our one rule is whoever cares the most wins. So we don't fight about things because ultimately one of us is going to care about whether it's a moment, whether it's what we tackle next, whatever it is, one of us is gonna care more. And it's always very clear which one of us that is. So it makes it easy to end something that could be a stalemate otherwise.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I like that, not on principle.
Ben Blacker: No, never. Never.
Sarah Enni: Well that's awesome advice. Well, thank you so much Ben. This has been so fun.
Ben Blacker: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Enni: The best.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Ben. Follow him on Twitter @BenBlacker and on Instagram @BABlacker and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
Hayley Hershman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to production assistant Tasneem Daud and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
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