This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Patrick Oliver Jones: As an actor, I fully appreciate and recognize that I couldn't do what I do without a writer doing what they do. Their words and characters are the basis for any work I've had in theater, television, or film. The writer's strike this past summer highlighted just how important they are, because without them, there is no entertainment industry. In part one of my conversation with writer Steve Cuden, we talked about the process of creating the musical Jekyll & Hyde with Frank Wildhorn. For the second part of our discussion, we'll dive into his work in television and as a college professor. We'll get a crash course in what it takes to craft an engaging story that not only touches an audience, but more importantly, means something personally to the writer as well.

Because I know for years and years and years, I used to think to myself, well, I've got to create this for someone. I've got to create it for an audience or for a producer or for someone. And that just tweaks your thinking in a whole different way. Don't create it for anyone else, create it for yourself. Make yourself happy.

[1:33] Patrick Oliver Jones: An actor and singer for more than 30 years. Each episode, I talk with fellow creatives who bring us stories from their own life, of personal struggles and professional hardships with lessons we can all learn from. Follow Why I'll Never Make It on Instagram at winMe Podcast. There you can subscribe, donate, and learn more about others overcoming challenges in this industry. Again, that's on Instagram at WinMe Podcast. You can find a link to that in the show notes as well.

[2:15] Patrick Oliver Jones: You had this collaboration with Frank Wildhorn that fizzled, but there was also another collaboration that you had on your other side of writing, your screenwriting for television. And you had a partner at one point, a sitcom partner, and you and he started writing some scripts together. How did that partnership come together and flourish at least for a time?

[2:37] Steve Cuden: So that was a much less successful partnership, though a good friendship than what I wound up having with Frank. So his name was Steve Sostarsic. Steve and I met when we were both at USC. We met in a playwriting class taught by a very famous radio playwright named Norman Corwin. And Norman, in his day, was the most respected radio playwright in the world. His show was on CBS every week. He preceded, I believe, Orson Welles, and it was a playwright class. I was writing some form of comedic stuff, and he was writing, because that's all he ever wrote was comedy. And he and I hit it off, and we wrote any number of scripts together, features and pilot attempts at different things. But at some point, about a year out of school, two years out of school, I got busy with Frank, and he went off and became partners with a guy named David Silverman, and the two of them then had a massive sitcom career, massive.

They wrote hundreds of scripts. The executive produced any number of shows, and I wasn't part of that. But Steve and I continued to be friends and we continued to work on one screenplay after another over time, none of which we sold, which was very frustrating. But eventually, during one of the writer strikes in the late 80s, he took a job at Disney TV animation writing Winnie the Pooh, which he eventually won an Emmy for. And while he was there, he said to me, Do you want to write animation? And I thought, Do I want to write animation or not? And I said, Well, I'm not working and getting paid for it. So, yes, the answer is yes. So he turned me on to some people that he knew who were looking for writers, and that began a career in animation. And Steve is the one who eventually talked to people at Disney TV animation, and I wound up there for a couple of years. But that began my animation writing career, which ran for almost 20 years.

[4:37] Patrick Oliver Jones: And how does animation writing differ from other TV or film writing?

[4:42] Steve Cuden: The biggest difference, or at least it was, and I think it has changed somewhat over time. The biggest difference is you are trained as a screenwriter to avoid telling the actors how to act, to avoid telling the directors how to direct, to avoid dictating what each little moment looks like and sounds like. And in an animation script, because you're writing a script that will be turned over to a storyboard artist to draw, you put everything in. You're actually writing a written storyboard. So you're putting in all these details that you're trained not to do when you're writing a feature or a live-action TV show.

[5:25] Patrick Oliver Jones: So does that mean that, especially for animation, writers have a lot more control about what the final product could be?

[5:32] Steve Cuden: I would say that there's some degree of truth to that, though the real truth is animation writers have very limited control over anything. Right. Which is why I kind of asked the question tentatively, because everything that I've read and heard about writers, especially in Hollywood, whether it's TV or film, is that they kind of have this product, it gets shoved into another room and then they never see it again and it comes out much like Jekyll & Hyde as a different baby.

[6:00] Steve Cuden: So yes, that's 100% true. And by the way, had I had that experience, all those experiences before I ever started working with Frank, then the notion of me being removed and replaced at some point would have meant a lot less to me because it wouldn't have been as it would have been more common. When you're writing for TV, almost anything for TV, whether it's live action or animation, whatever, if you are not the showrunner, and I never was, if you're not the showrunner and you're just a writer, just a writer, well, I've got nothing without the writer. But if you're a lowly writer and not a showrunner, and you write a script, in animation, the tendency is for it to never come back to you after the first draft.

It goes up the chain through various people, it gets written, rewritten, rewritten, revised, and I became a complete and utter mercenary. You want to hire me, hire me. I'm gonna write your script to the best of my ability. I'm gonna turn it in. If you like it, great. If you don't, great, whatever it is, you're gonna rewrite it anyway, because the people that are in charge always want to make it in their image rather than yours. So you just come to expect that it's going to be rewritten. As long as the check cleared the bank, I'm a perfectly happy guy. And I was good at it. I was really good at it, and I was fast. So as a screenwriter of things like TV animation, you don't really worry too much about what it is you've turned in as long as you know you did the best you could.

And that's important. You better do the best you can because then they're not going to hire you again. I got rehired on many shows many times. And I wrote many episodes of shows that was one episode and I was done. And a lot of that had to do with whether the show was picked up and whether or not the story editors of those shows had friends they wanted to feed and all the rest of it. So that was a very good long-term career. I mean, I wrote 90 teleplays in 15, 20 years.

[7:51] Patrick Oliver Jones: Wow. That was very busy for a while. And good. Although the real difference, and there's a huge difference, animation teleplays do not get residuals. They don't. They don't get residuals.

[8:01] Steve Cuden: Interesting. Still the case to this day.

[8:03] Patrick Oliver Jones: So that's why you have to really crank it out because that's the only way you get paid.

[8:07] Steve Cuden: You do. I was writing between 12 and 14 scripts a year for a while.

[8:12] Patrick Oliver Jones: Interesting. So you're really cranking it out.

[8:14] Steve Cuden: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a lot. And it's not even in a full year. It's only really in a nine-month season. So you're really cranking it out.

[8:20] Patrick Oliver Jones: Right, with the summer off. Now, with the recent writer's strike, a lot of issues around AI have come up. And it seems like, you know, I'm trying to put myself in now the producer's shoes. It's like, well, if all we need is just kind of a nugget of an idea, a beginning point, well, then AI can get this first script done, and then we'll just revise it. Is that what could happen?

[8:39] Steve Cuden: Or it could easily happen. And that's what part of the writer's strike was all about, that they didn't want this to happen, and it shouldn't happen. There is a danger here with AI. First of all, they've not created AI yet, and that's the key word there is yet, in which it's better than a human. That hasn't happened yet. It's not equal to a human or better than a human. It's stilted. It's still not quite right. There is something that still happens in the human brain where one plus one equals seven. But the computer is doing one plus one equals two. And it rarely will make that leap. And if it makes that leap, it's just luck. In a human, the human mind says, I'll take this element and that element, and I'm going to push them together and make a whole brand new element no one's ever thought of before, or come at it from a different perspective or angle than no one's ever thought of before.

And so humans are still indispensable in terms of turning out quality work. That does not mean that as AI continues to be refined and improved, that it won't get there. And it might get there faster than we know. It might get there this year, it might get there next year. Yeah, and it might not get there for 10 years. Who knows? I hope it doesn't, because I think that art should not be created by a computer. You can use a computer to help you create art. But art is a particularly human. In my opinion, art is why we are alive.

[10:14] Patrick Oliver Jones: Right. We are alive to have good lives, hopefully, if you're fortunate and you have a good life. I don't think most people want to live their life only to work at a dull, dead-end job. Most people don't. They'll take them if they need to. For money or for money. They and many people do, and you know, good on them for doing that because they need to. That's what they support themselves. But I don't think that they then live for that. They live so that they can go home and either watch movies or TV or go to a play or read books or listen to music or whatever it is, go to the museum and look at art. People live because they want to have that enrichment in their lives. And I don't think a computer is ever going to deliver that. Now I can be easily proven wrong here soon.

[11:02] Steve Cuden: Yeah, I mean, computers, I mean, just think about where we were 20 years ago with computers. You know, now we have them in our hands and a smartphone. So I mean, a lot can happen in just a short amount of time. I'm coming up on 40 years on computers, and I still haven't seen a computer do what I can do.

[11:16] Patrick Oliver Jones: Very true. But it can make things more efficient. If you told me today, we're getting rid of all the computers, and we're going to give you back your old electric typewriter where you had to use whiteout to correct things. And if you got to page 60 and realized you needed to add a scene, you either tacked it on or you had to go back and retype the whole thing. If you told me that, I would tell you I'm done as a writer. I'm not writing anymore. That would be too painful. But again, that's using the computer for the menial task, not for the creative task.

[11:48] Steve Cuden: That's correct. So a great way to look at it is the computer is a tool, it's not the source.

[11:56] Patrick Oliver Jones: Right, because like it could be equated to a painter. A painter could just dip his hands into the paint and just kind of create something, or he can find a brush to manipulate it in another way that his hands can't do. And so a computer can be done in the same way. The computer isn't creating the art, but it is manipulating or moving the art in a certain way. But they're trying to get the computer to create the art.

[12:19] Steve Cuden: Yes, I'm sure it's certainly much cheaper. And it's a matter of money, it's just money.

[12:24] Patrick Oliver Jones: It's always about money, isn't it?

[12:25] Steve Cuden: Yeah, you know, Rick Rubin, who wrote, I can't remember the name of his new book, but it's just fantastic about creativity and how people create. In it, he basically says that you should not create art for anyone else. You should only create it for yourself. And by doing that, you will then open up the world because you're just a human and you have feelings about the work you're doing.

[12:52] Steve Cuden: And so if you have sensibility about the work you're doing, there's a reasonable chance that others will also agree that it's worthy and that it's something that they want to observe, listen to, watch, whatever. Because I know for years and years and years, I used to think to myself, well, I've got to create this for someone. I've got to create it for an audience or for a producer or for someone. And that just tweaks your thinking in a whole different way. Don't create it for anyone else, create it for yourself. Make yourself happy. I think that's really great. Well, yeah, as we bring our shows, especially in theater, bring our shows to an audience. The audience is that other character that will inform, oh, this is working and that isn't working.

But it's very different to tweak and start to let a piece evolve rather than having the audience be the first and foremost reason for creating it. In my opinion, you cannot create for everybody. So, you know, who are you really creating for? And there are millions of examples of people who created something for an audience and the audience rejected it and said, No, we're not interested. Well, Jekyll and Hyde in 2013 was created with the idea that the audience would love it. I was about to say that's been one of Frank Wildhorn's biggest critiques. It's that it's more commercial rather than personal. That's a whole other kettle of fish. I'm just going off of what critics have said or inferred at least.

I'm not sure Frank has figured out how to tell a story in a way that touches people in a deeply meaningful way. I think he has in a couple of cases. I think Jekyll did touch people in a deeply meaningful way. But I think that there's a tendency to try to be commercial, to try to be pop, whatever that is. And I think that that has in some ways kept the critics on his back rather than gotten them off his back.

[15:00] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, moving on to story number three, apart from the writing that you've done, you're now starting to teach the next generation of writers. And in 2011, you began teaching at Point Park University. And as you began to teach this next generation, as you began to mentor them, what stood out to you of these young people that you were helping?

[15:22] Steve Cuden: So there's the it's a that's a loaded question. I try to keep it open ended so you can just run with it. Here is the issue where I'm not sure I know how to answer it properly or in a meaningful way. People who are 18 years old, 19 years old, 20 years old, by and large, in my experience with the hundreds that I've taught, but that's still a limited number compared to the whole, by and large, they haven't lived enough life yet to have their own stories to tell. And if you push them toward it, which I used to do regularly, tell your story. They then stop and they go, I don't have a story to tell. I don't know what to tell. And so what you find in a smart, talented 18, 19-year-old student is you find that they do a really good job of emulating or imitating those things that have come before, the things that they like.

In their mind's eye, they want to work on. They want to do that. They want to write that comedy. They want to write that drama. They want to write that action piece, whatever that is. And so it's imitative versus innovative. So it took me a little while as a teacher to understand this. And once I did, I got a lot less worried about it because you can find lots and lots and lots of examples of highly successful people that will tell you that in the beginnings of their careers, they were imitating others. They were standing on the shoulders of those who'd come before. And by imitating those people, you can find lots of comedians who will tell you that they were just stealing the jokes of comedians who came before, et cetera. And writers the same. Just like you and Frank with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

[17:08] Patrick Oliver Jones: Exactly.

[17:10] Steve Cuden: Exactly right. And well, you should, by the way. You should do that. You should figure out what it is that people that have been successful did so that you can then become successful too in your, hopefully in your own way. So I got a lot less concerned about them imitating and more concerned about them learning how to be craftspeople in this art form called screenwriting. So that when they finally grow up and mature and have some stories to tell, they have the facility to tell it in a way that people in Hollywood would recognize as professional. That's where I came from. How do you make this work? If I tried to press them to come up with unique, creative, really interesting, beautiful stories, I wasn't getting very far.

I'll tell you a quick story. One of my favorite classes to teach was called Narrative Structure. Sounds very dry and boring, but it was one of my favorite classes to teach because we showed a lot of movies and analyzed them, and it was a lot of fun for me. And every single year, at some point in that class, without my ever prompting it, somebody, usually two thirds of the way through the semester, some student would raise their hand and say, you know, I've been working on a story that is completely unique. Nobody's ever seen it before. And I'd go, oh, okay. Tell me what your premise is. Pitch it to me. What is your story? And out would come some story that they would tell me. And then I would say, well, that's just like this movie, that movie, this movie, that movie, that movie, and that movie.

And their jaws would hit the floor because at the age of 19, they haven't seen that many movies. They haven't seen them. No, so they don't know. So they think they've come up with something completely unique and they haven't. And that as we all know, there are no really original stories anymore. There are original takes on old stories.

[19:03] Patrick Oliver Jones: Right.

[19:03] Steve Cuden: New ways to tell them. Yeah, that's exactly right.

[19:06] Patrick Oliver Jones: As you started teaching, what tips or advice did you actually learn yourself? You know, that would have helped you either when you were first starting out, or even could help you now as you write. What did you learn from your students and from teaching them?

[19:21] Steve Cuden: To take your time and not be afraid to try things. Sometimes when you're working as a professional writer, you don't have the time to try things. You just have to crank. And that happened more often for me as a professional than I cared for, but that was the way it worked. And you were given limited amount of time, sometimes only days, to turn out a whole script. So the ability to experiment and try this or that and sit back and analyze it is not great in the professional world. But in the student world, I used to encourage them to think of their idea through far more than you might otherwise and then write. And so I learned that by going through that with them. I also found humans of all kinds will either be very Johnny on the spot with things, or they will be laggards.

And I think a huge number of artists tend to be, I don't want to use the word lazy, that's not the right word. They're reluctant to push forward with their stuff because they're afraid to expose themselves to the world. And one of the things that I definitely learned that I that I already knew, but then it got reinforced was that you have to, have to. And this is what you see in school is somebody's written something and they're not only not excited to show it to you. They're afraid to show it to you. And this is not good. Because Aristotle, 2700 years ago, writes in The Poetics that there are sort of three legs to making a complete work. You have to have the messenger, that's the writer, the message, that's the story, and a receiver, that's the audience. And if you don't have those three things, you don't have a complete circuit.

[21:23] Patrick Oliver Jones: Yeah.

[21:24] Steve Cuden: So if you're the if you're the messenger and you have a message, but you don't show anybody, well, it's what is that? That's might be fun for you. You may enjoy yourself. But I mean, yeah, there's that personal writing that you were talking about, just writing something for yourself, which certainly has its own beneficial, but that's more of a therapeutic benefit, of course. Helping improving the world. Well, if you write, if you're a diary writer, you're a journal, you know, a personal journalist, you may not want to show that to anybody ever because they're just your own personal things. But if you want to be in the commercial world, and that is the world we're talking about now, not the not the uncommercial world, not the amateur world, we're talking about being in the professional world, you have to give it up.

And that means people are going to tell you you suck. And there's no getting around it. And guess what? You're gonna suck a lot. That's just how it works. In fact, George Bernard Shaw famously said, a man who makes no mistakes makes nothing at all. So the only way to succeed is through failure. And if you understand that, then failure becomes a lot less onerous if you understand you need to go through it in order to find the end result. That no one in the history of the world, I don't think, has ever sat down and drafted a lengthy piece in one draft, and that was it. Out it went, and it was a big success, and everybody has hailed it forever. No, that doesn't happen that way. You write a draft, you write more drafts, you revise, you go back, you cut, you trim, you add, you subtract.

All those things are part of that process. That is a process through which you succeed by finding what works and doesn't work. So that what doesn't work, I think the word failure is probably a bad word. It's that you find things that are not effective in some way. So you eliminate the things that aren't effective to use the things that are effective. And as you well know, especially in the theater, and especially in the musical theater, what do they do? They take these things for months at a time and try them out out of town in front of different audiences. They go through all this, and what do they do? They rearrange songs, they eliminate songs, they add songs, they do all those things in front of a live audience while paying out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to get there.

So, you know, you're going to go through this process of editorializing your work. And if you're afraid of that by not showing it to anybody, you're never going to get there. That's just how it works.

[24:07] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, speaking of George Bernard Shaw, he also had another quote that has become somewhat of a derogatory saying in that those who can do, those who can't teach. You are now a teacher. What do you make of this kind of mindset? And that quote.

[24:30] Steve Cuden: I'm pretty sure that's a Woody Allen quote. Um, so the answer is um here's here's the truth, the bottom line truth. Most professional writers in Hollywood, of all ilk, doesn't matter what they write, most go through a period in their middle years where it gets harder and harder to find work. And there's a reason for it. Some people think it's ageism, and maybe to a certain extent it is ageism. But really, what it is is pyramidism. This was explained to me by a really excellent writer, producer named Michael Coleri. He and Mike Werb co-wrote Face/Off most famously, the Travolta Nick Cage movie. And Michael Kohlera used to talk about pyramidism. And what that means is when you start out at the in the beginning of your career, there are literally thousands and thousands of people trying to get in with you.

And these become your bottom line first level colleagues, like you would meet some of those people in college as well if you go to college. But as you step up the ladder, you go up this pyramid which moves to a point.

[25:37] Steve Cuden: And as you go up, people have dropped away over time. And as they drop away, others come in from the bottom to replace, to add to this pool. And so people that work on a sitcom say, uh, and they're on a staff, they will be brought in by an executive producer of some kind because they either they're either friends with them or they recognize that their work is great in some way and they want them on their staff. But over time, as people move on, younger people step up into those executive positions. And as the younger people step up into the executive positions, that means that they want to bring in their friends. And their friends tend to be younger and not you who are 10 or 15 or 20 years older than them.

They don't want to hang out for 10 hours a day in a room with dad. They want to hang out with their pals. So you get eliminated back out. Well, that doesn't happen so much in the freelance world of animation writing, but I was slowly what I call leaking oil. My career over time, I was finding less and less work. And I used to think to myself, is it over? I call it the reverse boiling lobster syndrome. The old adage that if you want to boil a lobster, you put it in a pot of cold water and turn the heat up and it won't know it's being boiled. If you drop it in the boiling pot, it screams and kicks and is angry and you know it's going through agony. So in the terms of writers in Hollywood, it's the reverse lobster syndrome.

They turn the heat off and you slowly unboil and get down to cold and you don't know it's happened because it's slowly happening to you. That happened to me. And I was thinking to myself for a good eight, nine, 10 years, well, what can I do with my life? And I thought maybe I would be pretty good at teaching. I thought about it. And then I started to look for teaching jobs. Only no one would hire an animation writer who had no terminal degree. Terminal degree being an MFA or a PhD. Oh, interesting. Okay. If you don't have those two, most call because I didn't want to teach high school, I want to teach college. Most of them won't hire you unless you've won big awards, or you ran, you were the executive producer of a big show.

But if you've won a Tony and Emmy and Oscar, et cetera, then they might entertain bringing you in to teach. If you haven't, which I hadn't, if you haven't done that, they're not going to hire you. So what did I do? In my mid-50s, I went back to school and got my MFA at UCLA in screenwriting.

[28:22] Steve Cuden: Just so you could teach. Just so I well, so I could give myself the opportunity to teach. I didn't know whether I was going to ever teach or not. I just knew that I had no chance without it. So I went back to school. And my after 30 years of being a writer, I went back to school to get a degree in how to write. And the curious thing was I thought I'm going to go into this thing. I'm going to ace my way through this. It's going to be a piece of cake. Uh, I'm not going to learn anything. I'm also going to stay under the radar. Nobody's going to know who I am or what I've done. I was wrong on all counts. I learned so much. It was, it boggled my mind how much I learned because I didn't understand the academic part of being a writer.

There is an academic part of it. And most good writers don't need it. They just do it intuitively or instinctively. Um, but most writers have to think their way through it. And I think the better writers think their way through it and know how it works academically. That is how what are the plot points and how does this work? And I learned a huge amount. And of course, I thought I'm gonna be under the radar. And on they had a picnic before the first day of class. And a student walked up to me. It was a female student, she was probably in her 30s. Most of the graduate students there were older. They were all in their late 20s at least, if not much older. And she walked up to me and she said, Are you Steve Cuden that wrote Jekyll and Hyde?

So so much for my being under the radar. And of course, then they all knew. Well, at least someone recognized that. Well, that was right. It's not like I don't get recognized. I just nobody knows who I am, really, you know. Right. I think of myself as the peak best of uh Jekyll and Hyde. Uh I was there in the beginning, but nobody knows who I am. And so having gotten that when I came out of school, June of 2010, by September or October of that year, so four or five months later, there was a notice in the Chronicle of Higher Education for teaching job at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, which is where I grew up. This is my hometown. And I thought maybe it's time for me to get out of Dodge.

And I applied for the job, and the fools accepted me. And so I moved back to Pittsburgh to teach because it was like I was ready to go. Like I said, if I had a big burgeoning career as a writer at that moment, I wouldn't have gone anywhere. But I didn't. Right. There was a slowing down, or uh I guess a break of uh so to speak.

[30:55] Patrick Oliver Jones: Yeah, so you had the chance to teach. And while you were there at Point Park, you actually crafted two books about writing as well. One called Beating Broadway and the other called Beating Hollywood. And I'm curious, what are the stylistic differences writing-wise when it comes to TV and stage?

[31:16] Steve Cuden: Well, they are quite different. So Beating Broadway is specifically about musicals, it's how to create stories for musicals. It's not about writing plays. And there is a big difference between plays and musicals, and we've already alluded to it a little bit here. Yes. So, okay, succinctly, a movie, like a musical, must move forward horizontally like a shark and not stop. It can't pause or stop, or you can't dwell on things. Musicals must move forward like a shark, otherwise it dies. A play, let's look at my favorite play of all plays, which is Waiting for Godot. Waiting for Godot goes vertical. It starts in one place, it ends in that place, and really, other than it teaches you about the entire world and humanity, it's got everything in it, and yet it goes nowhere.

It goes vertically, it just keeps going up and up and up, and it never goes off of where it is. It doesn't go forward. They don't go forward. But a musical must move forward, which a movie must move forward. All right. So the biggest difference between musicals and screenplays, obviously, is the music and lyrics. That's obvious. The storytelling, you can actually compare them quite naturally. They compare very well in terms of the underlying story, how you tell the story, that you have characters who are revealing themselves in one way, shape, or form. Now, what's interesting about musicals to me, when you write a screenplay, we teach that you can only dwell on two senses, sight and sound, because the audience is only going to be able to see and hear.

They're not going to be able to smell, they're not going to be able to touch, and they're not going to be able to taste. So those three senses that we have are not in play in a screenplay. And more importantly, in a screenplay, because we can only deal in what we see and hear, you can't not in any meaningful way describe what a character is thinking. So in a novel, you can have a whole novel about what a character is thinking in their head, in their mind's eye, without ever having a conversation with anybody, right? In a screenplay, the audience will only know what people are saying or doing those two things. But musicals have this gift that just separates them completely out. What's that gift?

You can go inside of a character's mind and thoughts via this vehicle called a song. And you can get into their emotions and you can figure out what they are worried about and what they're happy about and so on, without them ever saying it to another character. They're singing it, they're expressing it through lyrics. That is a gift. That is what makes musicals really special is that you can go inside of a character's mind through song.

[34:23] Steve Cuden: Now, Eugene O'Neill, he wrote up this massive play in which characters, the action would freeze and the character would step downstage and speak their mind to the audience. And then they'd go back and the action would start up again. So it was like they were freeze-framing the action for the characters to express their inner thoughts. You can't imagine many plays getting away with that, and you can't imagine many screenplays getting away with that. Though screenplays do that too with voiceovers and so on. But the big difference between screenplays, plays, and musicals are the songs and the fact that they can take you internally into emotional land that you have a very hard time doing in a basic screenplay without a character expressing it verbally or physically.

Big difference. And also a song touches someone, it reveals something in a different way than just a spoken word. There's that melody, there's that emotional element that, yes, you someone can speak eloquently and you can be moved by it, but a song has that other benefit that just a spoken word doesn't have. So you could have a concert with music. There symphonies are all the time where there's no lyrics at all. And people are completely moved by the music. And the music is innate, and you can't learn this piece of music is going to make me happy, and that music is going to make me sad. It just happens. It's not something that you're going to educate yourself about other than to experience it.

And by experiencing it, you actually feel these things. And it is about emotion. We are, by the way, in the visceral business. We're in the gut punch business. We don't sell intellectuality or academia. We sell passion. And so the passion that you get in a song from the music and the lyrics is a very big gut punch most of the time. Right. By the way, that's what Frank Wildhorn goes to lunch on is gut punch music. Right? Whether it's to your soul, to your ears, to your eyes. Exactly. He's he it's big, it's brash, it's gonna be in your face. Sometimes he's subtle, but not frequently. Usually big and bold. And uh, and with that, that idea, the these books were called Beating Broadway, Beating Hollywood. What do you mean behind that idea of beating?

[36:47] Steve Cuden: So there are it's a triple entendre. So I very much in both of the books define how stories are beaten out, broken down into beats, narrative beats. And so in Beating Broadway and Beating Hollywood, I took 40 musicals in Beating Broadway, and I took 40 movies in Beating Hollywood, and I broke them down into their narrative beats, plot points, their structure, how they work, so that a writer could look at them and say, Oh, here's how this movie actually lays out structurally without you having to watch the movie. It helps to watch the movie or watch the musical, but you don't have to in order to understand here's the structure of Hairspray, or here's the structure of Jekyll and Hyde, or here's the structure of Rocky or whatever it is I was pulling down.

So there's the narrative beats, there's actually beating the street, right? Yeah, pounding the pavement, right? Pounding the pavement. How do you beat this out? And then how do you beat it into yourself to make it work? So it's not about beating you up, although I guess that could be in there too. That that's not my intent. Right. Uh, but it's to play on the word beat. It's the beating heart of the storytelling world.

[38:09] Patrick Oliver Jones: If you're hearing this message, then between last week's episode and this one, you've heard Steve's three stories he wanted to share with us.

[38:18] Patrick Oliver Jones: But subscribers to this podcast actually get bonus audition stories as well, where guests share their own experiences in the audition room, whether from behind the table or in front of it.

[38:31] Patrick Oliver Jones: To become a subscriber and get early access to lots of bonus content, go to why I'll never make it.com and click subscribe, or you'll find a link to it in the show notes.

[38:43] Patrick Oliver Jones: Another benefit for subscribers is that they don't have to listen to any ads during the episode.

[38:49] Patrick Oliver Jones: Because coming up, Steve answers the final five questions, but only after this commercial break.

[39:00] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, let's get into these final five questions. We'll start off with the first one. What do you remember most about your first professional show?

[39:08] Patrick Oliver Jones: I assume this would be as a writer, or did you ever act professionally?

[39:11] Steve Cuden: No, my first professional show was as a lighting designer.

[39:14] Patrick Oliver Jones: Lighting designer, there we go. Yes. What do you remember most about it?

[39:17] Steve Cuden: So the first professional show that I ever did was I lit three shows for John Cassavetes, the great filmmaker John and actor John Cassavetes. And I spent five or six months around this guy. He's the only person I think of as a legitimate genius who I've ever actually worked for or with. And what I remember the most about what went on there is chaos. He loved and thrived on chaos. And as soon as anything became static or set, he would throw it into chaos. And it went on like that for months. I worked for him for almost six months. And I lit three shows in a very small theater with the exact same set of lights, and all three looked totally different. They had different tonality to them, they had different movement to them.

They all three looked completely different with mostly clear lights. So what I most remember was he and I not being able to communicate for a long time on the same level because I was using theater terms and he was using film terms. And so I would say to him, this is the example I'll give you, which is he would say, You've got to light this character that's upstage in this what sort of like a semi-hallway in this one scene. And I said to him, John, do you want that lit from the front or from the side? And he said to me, Steve, please don't be artsy fartsy. And then I would say, I would say to him one day, uh, you know, we could make a pattern on this wall with a go-bo. And he'd say, What's a go-bo?

And I'd say, It's a pattern. It goes in the light and it makes patterns. And from then on, anytime he wanted a light cut off of a piece of scenery or something, he'd say, Can you go-bo that light off? Okay. Love it. So it took a while for him and I to get on the same train.

[41:13] Steve Cuden: The same language. The same language, because I was not a filmmaker at that time, and he was not really a theater guy at that time. We're talking in two different languages. That's what I mostly remember. It was the seminal experience of my entire career. Because he had we had three shows in repertory, one starred Peter Falk, one starred John Voigt and Jen Rollins, and one starred Jenna Rollins and a very fine actor named Michael McGuire. And the people who were involved in those shows, it was unbelievable. It was a who's who of Hollywood that came to see it.

[41:47] Patrick Oliver Jones: Oh, I bet, yeah, with those big names.

[41:49] Steve Cuden: Yeah, of course. It was unreal.

[41:51] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, number two, and we'll deal with you as a writer, how has the industry changed most since you first started?

[41:58] Steve Cuden: I think it's gotten harder to get in. I think it's much more exclusive. The money that's involved in shows is much bigger. So the chances are they're willing to take, talk about vanilla down the middle. They're willing to take less chances because the money is too high and too expensive. I also think the one thing that I notice for Broadway for sure is we've priced a huge amount of the audience out. They cannot afford to go see a show anymore. And I think that that's really happened over the last 25, 30 years. And it's a shame because the theater should be, especially Broadway, should be for everybody. And it isn't. It's for people that have lots and lots of money. Um, I also think we now have way, way, way too many TV channels.

[42:43] Steve Cuden: And you got that right. I mean, we're into the thousands now. So thousands. I think we've gone way too far on both the expense of things and the amount of stuff that we're shoving at people, especially in the day and age with video, uh, video games and distractions on the internet and so on. There's too much. That's my feeling.

[43:06] Patrick Oliver Jones: Number three, what does success or making it mean to you?

[43:10] Steve Cuden: So this has changed a lot over the last 50 years for me. Um, success to me used to mean when I first started out, which is how I think I was fairly shallow. Well, I think a lot of people are shallow when they're young. When I was a kid, being successful meant I was going to be famous and have a lot of money and live in a great big house with a fancy car, and everybody would know who I was. That was to me what success was supposed to be is big fame and fortune. Now, success to me is feeling like I'm satisfying myself and feeling like I'm doing work that is potentially valuable to other people and hopefully helping others in some way as a teacher, as a writer, the two books are really of an extension of teaching.

But I tried to write both of those books in an entertaining way, not in a boring academic way, but in some way that keeps your interest. And making money is still a good thing. And having money is a form of success, but it is not to me the arbiter of success, because I think success comes from more from within than it comes from without. Well, I think the most long-lasting success has to come from something that you're satisfied with because the adulation of others is gonna come and go. And maybe you will, maybe you won't get it. But if you're satisfied with what you're creating, it goes back to what we were saying, create that art, write for yourself, paint for yourself. Don't try to appeal to the master.

[44:46] Patrick Oliver Jones: 100%. If you've never had the experience of going to an award show and being nominated and not winning, or being nominated and winning, which I've had both. And when you go home, you still have to take your pants off one pant leg at a time. And the next day, nobody is bothering you or calling you and telling you how wonderful you are. If you've never had that experience, then you don't understand that success is not winning awards and not money. It's how do you feel about who you are as a person, how you treat people, and whether or not you're satisfied with your life. And that's success to me.

[45:23] Patrick Oliver Jones: Number four, describe a personal lesson that has taken you a while to learn, or maybe one that you're still working on to this day.

[45:31] Steve Cuden: Yeah, no, it hasn't gone away. I have been lifelong neurotic. Uh, I think many writers and actors and directors and producers are neurotic. I think it's the nature of the beast. And what I've had to learn over a long time is not to be so hard on myself, to accept the way things are, versus being angry and upset at the way things aren't. You know, uh, one of the lessons that I had to learn the hard way, and part of it was Jekyll and Hyde, was that was a big karmic lesson for me going through what I went through with Jekyll and Hyde. You can't put all of your eggs into one basket, and you can't expect your life to be perfect in any way, shape, or form. And so it's critical that you have a sense of humor about the way things are, and that you take life as a series of lessons.

So let me back that up half a step and say that I used to say to myself, why is this happening to me? Why am I going through this? This is it's horrible. Whatever's happening. Why am I going through this? Oh, woe is me, woe is me. And then I was taught a lesson by a friend um close to 35 years ago, and they said, Look, the cliche is life is an endless journey. If you ever arrive, you're in trouble. So don't ever arrive. But it's this endless journey. But in doing that, you must, must think of all of life as one big series of lessons that you're learning. And instead of asking, why is this happening to me? Ask yourself, what am I supposed to be learning from this, no matter how horrible it is.

There's a very famous book written by Victor Frankl called Man's Search for Meaning, in which he had been a Holocaust survivor, and he talked about how they found meaning in life while in the concentration camps. I can't think of anything that would be worse than that, really, as a society and humanity to do that to people. And so if they can figure that out, then you, in your little artistic career in which you're not succeeding at the moment, can also survive that. What are you supposed to be learning from this moment? That's the big lesson that I've taken away in my life. To learn from things that are not pleasant, that doesn't mean you have to like them, but can you learn from them?

[48:01] Patrick Oliver Jones: Yeah. And this leads us right into that fifth and final question. What is the most useful advice that you have received and how have you applied it to your life or career?

[48:12] Steve Cuden: So two lessons that are vital. I have a sign on my computer, sitting at the top of my computer that I typed out and printed and so on. And what it says is enjoy the ride on this roller coaster. That's what I say to myself. I try to think about that every day. Enjoy the ride on this roller coaster because it's going to be up and down and up and down. It's not going to be smooth and steady and stable for anybody. I don't care how successful they are or how famous they are or how much money they have. It doesn't matter. Life is up and down and up and down. It will not all be winners, for sure. So to keep in mind the paraphrasing from Apollo 13, which was failure is not an option. That's not true.

Failure is an option. We already talked about failure earlier in this show. It's okay to fail. And then the last bit of advice that I like to give to people when they ask, it's that you need to learn how to read contracts, and then you need to actually read every contract. And this is not appealing to most people who aren't lawyers. I'm not a lawyer, but I have found if I don't read a contract, it stands a good chance of biting me on the butt later. So contracts are only there to put into some memorialized way what your understanding with each other are. And you don't ever need that contract unless somebody is not following what you agreed to. Then you need the contract. And if the contract isn't right at that point, you have a problem.

[50:00] Patrick Oliver Jones: There you go. See, the business of the show, right?

[50:02] Steve Cuden: That's correct.

[50:03] Patrick Oliver Jones: There it is. Business of show.

[50:04] Steve Cuden: That's right. Well, Steve, this has just been so enjoyable. Thank you for the time that you have given. I it's been such a pleasure to talk to you and hear your stories.

[50:13] Steve Cuden: Well, Patrick, the pleasure has been all mine. Believe me, it's been lots of fun. I got this to express a few things I don't normally talk about, and I had a lot of fun doing it.

[50:28] Patrick Oliver Jones: Thank you so much for joining Why I'll Never Make It. And don't forget, you can become a subscriber and get bonus conversations by going to why I'll never make it.com and click subscribe or just look for the link in the show notes.

[50:45] Patrick Oliver Jones: Well, that about does it for me. I'm your host, Patrick Oliver Jones, in charge of writing, editing, and producing this podcast. Background music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions and John Bartmann. Be sure to join me next time as we talk more about why I'll never make it.