by Mike Sacks
The answer is never, “Really? I loved it. It’s really surprising that you didn’t love it.” It’s usually, like, “Okay, great. Thanks. Talk to you later.” And you can tell that they didn’t love it either, and they’re sort of embarrassed that they had to send it to you. There definitely have been occasions when I have passed on something and the client has fought for it and said, “I think you’re wrong about this.” But when you get that other immediate response from the client, you know you were right and they were just doing a favor for a friend.
How important is the cover letter?
The cover letter is largely irrelevant. A letter is mostly for writers who are submitting to someone who is not expecting their material. We all receive SPAM e-mails all day long at the major agencies from writers who have bought e-mail address lists. They are deleted immediately. There’s not even the slightest consideration. I don’t read the letters. When a client has referred a friend of theirs, the letter is not necessary.
Do you prefer original material or scripts based on existing shows?
Definitely original material. I think there was a period more than ten years ago when everybody needed to have material based on pre-existing shows. And that day has largely gone away. It is impossible to work in television without having a piece of original material.
Why did it change?
I think it changed because the industry became significantly more competitive. Reality television happened. Survivor happened. Suddenly all the hours on prime time that had been devoted to scripted television shows disappeared. Those hours got eaten up by reality shows. So there are fewer shows and it became more competitive to get onto those shows. You get to a point where you can only read so many Parks and Recs, 30 Rocks, and Offices. So how do you differentiate yourself?
Let’s say there’s a new show that they’re staffing and they’re accepting submissions from writers. The number of scripts they’re sifting through is probably four hundred, five hundred scripts. There has to be a way to differentiate yourself from the pile. The idea of having an original voice has become something of a premium. Everybody feels like the bar has been raised. So you have to be able to prove that you can write something original and unique.
How much material does a writer need to submit? How many scripts?
You need at least one great sample script. But if you are an aspiring writer, you should always be writing. One of the greatest frustrations I have with my clients is that they get staffed on a television show, and then, three years later, the television show goes down and they don’t have a piece of new material. And you just want to say, “What the fuck have you been doing for the last three years?” So to get that first job, you need one great piece of material. It doesn’t hurt to have a second piece. There are writers and showrunners who ask to read two things, but one great piece can get it done. But the next time out, you’ve got to have something new. You can’t just send the same great script to all the same people again. They’ve already read it.
Can you submit other forms of humor writing? Say, funny print pieces?
It depends. It depends on the showrunner who’s hiring. If you look at animated shows like Bob’s Burgers or Family Guy, those are shows that have hired writers based upon alternative format comedy. Their interest was not generated by a writer’s spec half hour. So, you know, it depends entirely on the showrunner. Writers have been hired from Twitter streams or short films they’ve made for Channel 101 or books that they’ve written. This can all pique a showrunner’s interest. But ultimately most showrunners want to read something structured and narrative before they make a hire.
How do you, as an agent, differ from a manager?
I differ enormously from a manager. Managers are not able to negotiate employment for their clients. Lawyers are. Agents are. Managers are technically not. This is a line that is crossed all the time, every day. It’s not upheld, generally. But I view a manager’s job as sort of holding the hand of the client and working on a piece of material over a long period of time before it goes out to the world to be judged. And to help a client with long-term career goals.
I view my job of an agent as securing work. But it’s become much more than that. It’s not just about staffing people, securing people’s jobs. It’s also about when writers are selling their development deals. It’s my job to help put together the right pieces that can make those deals attractive to a network.
Is it virtually impossible to get hired as a television writer without an agent?
It is not impossible. It does happen now and again, but rarely.
It always tends to be one of those chicken-and-the-egg things. You can’t get an agent without having the possibility of getting a job because agents are animals who want people who pay commission. On the other hand, you can’t get a job without having an agent. So how do you break through that? The most organic way is to move out to Los Angeles immediately after college. You have to move out to LA. New York just doesn’t have that many television writing jobs.
Once you get out to LA, try to get a job as a production assistant on a show, and start to get to know writers. Then work your way up and eventually become a writer’s assistant. You have to become a known commodity. That’s the real way to do it without going through a program. If you work your way up to writer’s assistant, eventually you’ll get hired on a show that works. And then you start getting promoted. The minute anybody in Hollywood sniffs that you’re getting promoted, you’ll start to receive phone calls from UTA, William Morris, ICM, and all the rest of the talent agencies, with all of them saying, “Hey, man, I hear you’re great. I’d like to read your stuff.” And then you’ll get an agent.
PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE
MARC MARON
Host, WTF with Marc Maron; Performer, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Comedy Central Presents; Creator/Writer, Maron
For awhile, I hit a wall where in my mind the choices were pretty dire. I didn’t have any idea how I was going to continue to make a living. There was real fucking fear there. For one reason or another, the timing was right in the medium [podcasting] that I chose in 2009, and things evolved.
Quite honestly, I try not to have regrets in my life, because it is what it is. But whatever I went through, there was not a plan. My process creatively is not an easy one. I’m impulsive, I’m filled with anxiety, I don’t have the ability to compartmentalize, I don’t have the wherewithal or the confidence to plan and follow through when working toward a goal. Everything has always been very immediate to me, and that is exhausting. It could really have gone either way. In talking to other people and looking back at my own career, the people who were more aware of their talent and how to use it, and more aware of their limitations and what they were really shooting for, were able to find their place a little easier. If you start out as a comic, you want to be a big comic. But as you get older, you realize, “Wow, there are only a few of those at any given point in time, and it’s a tough life.” The possibilities of not getting to that level, where you can really bank some money or build a career, are very high. Depending on what your ego can handle at those crossroads in life, you might say, “I do write great jokes, and I know I want to be involved somehow, so how do I adapt?” The ability to get away from your ego enough to recognize your limitations, and to take action toward becoming a writer or working for a sketch group—that’s a big moment. The thing I now know is that the people who were aware and cognizant of the business ultimately found a little more peace of mind—a place to express partially, if not more so, their particular sense of humor.
A lot of the dudes I started with, the ones who didn’t fall away or end up club comics for life, very early on went into writing. Whether you get into producing, or directing, or management, relationships are built early on; crews start out generationally. You build those relationships when you’re all struggling, and those are the relationships that are going to carr
y you through a career—if you’re lucky enough to have one.
As far as whether you choose this career, I have not found that to be a choice. In my experience, somehow or another, your brain has already told you that this is a reasonable life to live, which is nuts. That comes with the territory. You’re going to have those things, no matter how crazy or insecure you are, that continue to propel yourself into this life. Some of that may be rebellion; some of that may be, “Fuck you, Mom and Dad.” Some of that may be grandiosity. But whatever it is, you’re already in it. And the deeper you get into it, it’s very hard to get out of it, even when things aren’t going well.
Don’t kid yourself: A lot of people fade away. A lot of people become tragic, whether they see it that way or not. I don’t know. There’s always this weird thing in show business where you never know when success is going to happen. It’s not a meritocracy; so much of it is about some weird shit aligning that’s usually out of your control, and you catch your break. And a lot of people don’t ever catch it.
I’ve learned from talking to people over the last few years on my podcast [WTF with Marc Maron] that people who work hard find something. There’s a certain amount of entitlement when you’re a young comic living the life, like, “Oh, it’ll happen,” even if you’re getting high every day and sleeping until three. The truth of the matter is that eventually you’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to find your consistency and your groove—somehow.
You just have to do it. There’s no schooling; there’s no anything. Find a place where you can get onstage and do it. Do you have favorite comics? Watch them. It’s very self-explanatory: You stand up there, by yourself, and you try to get laughs. I usually say, “Look, you might bomb, you might do great, but you’re not going to always do great. You’re not always going to bomb.” You have to figure out once you do it whether or not you’re infected with the bug that makes you keep wanting to do it. When you get off that stage, no matter what happens—whether they hated you or loved you—you have to get up there again. And if you do get up there . . . well, good luck, and welcome to the life.
GEORGE SAUNDERS
Comedy isn’t always the domain of comedians or traditonal comedy writers. Sometimes a writing professor who works alone in an office, doesn’t have a Twitter following or a TV show, and has never told jokes at comedy clubs can have a fundamentally better grasp of how humor works than those who make their living writing and saying things they call “comedy.”
Enter, stage left . . . George Saunders, one of the very best writers working today—and also one of the funniest. Born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas, and raised in the south suburbs of Chicago, Saunders originally sought a career in geophysical engineering. After graduating from the Colorado School of Mines in 1981, he worked as a “seismic prospector” for an oil exploration crew on the Indonesian island of Sumatra (where, according to The New York Times, he discovered Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, having read “virtually nothing” until that time), and then worked later as a technical writer for an environmental engineering company based in Rochester, New York. Saunders has also been employed as a Texas bar band guitarist, a Beverly Hills doorman, a Chicago roofer, an LA mover, and even a slaughterhouse worker in West Texas. (In a somewhat backhanded compliment, online magazine Salon used the following headline in a 2000 article about Saunders: “Knuckle-puller Makes Good.”) Somewhere in there, during what he calls “a series of attempts at channeling Kerouac,” Saunders enrolled at Syracuse University and earned an MA degree in creative writing. And then in 1996, at the age of thirty-seven, Saunders published his first collection of short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. At the time, according to The New York Times, David Foster Wallace declared Saunders “the most exciting writer in America.”
Over the past two decades, Saunders has published several more best-selling and critically acclaimed books, including the short story collections Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Tenth of December (2013); the novellas The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000) and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005); and an essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone (2007).
Saunders has received numerous awards, including the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Award, which he was granted in 2006 for “bring[ing] to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos and literary style all his own.”
In the past, you’ve talked about growing up in South Chicago, and that, as a child, you felt total freedom. But how do you think South Chicago affected you as a writer?
I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns. They were just merciless in terms of grammar and syntax and spelling, which was incredibly helpful later: They gave us the tools we could later use to build our taste. They forced us to become little language fiends—almost like, say, a great chef might force his kids to become food fiends. That taught us basic discernment. Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you’ve done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I’m always being edited by my inner nun. So in some ways this is good—it makes for good revision. But it can also be killing—you’re never satisfied.
How about as far as humor? Is it tied in any specific way to Chicago?
I think I got the idea that the high-serious and the funny were not separate. The idea that something could be gross and heartfelt at the same time. Some of the funniest things in South Chicago were also the most deeply true—these sort of over-the-line, rude utterances that were right on the money and undeniable. Their truth had rendered them inappropriate; they were not classically shaped, not polite, and they responded to the urgency of the moment.
In Chicago, people often told these odd little Zen parables, ostensibly for laughs, or to mock somebody out, but behind which I always felt were deeper questions looming, like who we are, and what the hell are we doing here, how should we love, what should we value, how are we to understand this veil of tears.
Do any specific anecdotes come to mind?
My whole childhood we lived next door to this family I’ll call the Smiths. We didn’t know them very well at all. At one point, Mrs. Smith’s mother, who was in her nineties, passed away. My dad went to the wake, where this exchange occurred:
Dad: “So sorry for your loss.”
Mrs. Smith: “Yes, it’s very hard.”
Dad: “Well, on the bright side, I suppose you must be grateful that she had such a long and healthy life.”
Mrs. Smith (mournful, dead-serious): “Yeah. This is the sickest she’s ever been.”
My dad came home just energized from this. I loved his reaction. My family was such a big influence on me. There was a real respect for language. It was understood as a source of power. Everyone was funny in a different flavor. You could make anything right—diffuse any tension, explain any mistake—with a joke. A joke or a funny voice was a way of saying: All is well. We’ll live. We still love you.
Can you talk a bit about your mother and father?
My father was from Chicago and my mother was from Amarillo, Texas. They met at a dance when my father was stationed down in Texas, in the air force. They were nineteen when they married, and had me when they were twenty-one. My dad is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, but he didn’t go to college right out of high school. He got out of the air force and moved back to Chicago and he did a bunch of different things—he was a collection agent for State Farm Insurance and then ended up as a salesman for a coal company. This was when there were still a lot of buildings being heated by coal. For awhile he was selling directly to landlords, and apparently sneaking into basements to do reconnaissance on the type of coal they were getting from other companies. But then he gradually worked his way up, and when I was in grade school he became vice president of the company. Around that time he had a falling-out with his boss and quit. He bought a couple of now defunct fast-food franchise r
estaurants called Chicken Unlimited, and that’s what he did while I was in high school. Well, that’s what we all did: worked in the restaurant. My mother and sisters worked the counter; I drove the delivery truck; my uncle managed one of the stores.
The main beauty of that job was getting to go in there day after day and see this parade of American characters. For many of those people, our restaurant was the closest thing to family they had: lonely, lonely, lonely. It would have been impossible for me, before that job, to imagine how filled America is with lonely, isolated people.
Many of the characters in your stories, whether they are good or bad, young or old, tend to be quite lonely.
What I remember about all this is that particular gloating teen delight that there were such crazies in the world and that I wasn’t one of them. But also the way this got complicated by coming to know them, by seeing them in these sad private moments, in our restaurant, sitting at one of our plastic booths all alone. The other kids and I were actually pretty good and gentle to them when the chance arose. But, of course, among ourselves, it was all posturing and harshness and war stories about what “the wackos” had done that day. Makes me sad to think of it at this thirty-year distance.
Do you remember any customers in particular?
Oh, sure. There was a woman we rather brutally called, but not to her face, “The Wacko.” She’d come in around four in the afternoon and chain-smoke and chain-drink Pepsis hour after hour. She used to wear a ratty imitation fur coat and talk to herself. She lived in a complex behind the restaurant. Almost the minute she got home, she’d call for delivery: a pack of cigarettes from the machine we had in the store and a large Pepsi. She’d sometimes order three or four times a night. I was the delivery guy, so I’d go over—I made seventy-five cents a delivery—and she’d be in this furnitureless apartment, shaking and talking to herself. And she wasn’t all that old either. She later slit her wrists and jumped in the Chicago River—only to be pulled out by some passing hero.