 Hello. Welcome to Dare to Dream. This show is sponsored by Dr. Dane here in Access Consciousness. If you are interested in any of their classes, workshops, online, products, books, go to drdanehere.com as well as accessconsciousness.com. Dare to Dream has been nominated for two People's Choice Podcast Awards as well as a Webby Award. And we are ranked consistently in the top best podcasts in self-improvement in all of Apple podcasts. My question to you is, what would you do to understand more about what goes on in the stage specifically musical theater? My guest today is Steve Kudin, who created the hit Broadway and international musical Jekyll and Hyde, writing the show's original book and lyrics with noted composer Frank Wildhorn. Steve has written 90 teleplays for popular animated TV series such as X-Men, The Batman, Iron Man, Pink Panther. Oh, this is a word that Steve will have to say, but I'm gonna go on to the next. Gargoyles and numerous others. Steve directed and co-produced the cult favorite horror comedy feature, Lucky. He's the author of two books on writing, Beating Broadway, one of which we will be discussing today and Beating Hollywood, which if you wanna go back in the archives, he was on the show four years ago, discussing. He taught screenwriting for 10 years in the Conservatory of Performing Arts at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. And Steve currently produces and hosts a podcast weekly called Storybeat with Steve Kudin. These are in-depth interviews exploring the creative process of artists of all kinds. To learn more about Steve, go to stevekudin.com and storybeat.net. And with that, I welcome Steve to the Dare to Dream show. So be welcome. Oh, hi Debbie, great to be here. And for everyone, Debbie will be on the show shortly on Storybeat in the next few weeks, in fact. Yes, absolutely. And I have to say, I'm still buzzing from our interview together because having done a considerable amount of these interviews over the last 12 years, yours is a standout. You're really a great interviewer. Oh, aren't you kind? Aren't you kind? You know, it's a great place to start because you have this ability in some of what you're doing today. Besides the podcast, what is it about speaking to people, celebrities, artists, creatives? What is it that really juices you up and gets you in that conversation? Oh, it's my entire life. I have been very interested in the process of creativity. How does one take inspiration or desire and turn it into a product of some kind? Cause at the end of the day, it's all about some production, whether you're producing a book or you're producing a play or whether you're producing a movie, it's all about producing something or a piece of art, anything like that. I've always been keenly interested in not so much, well, I love the outcomes, but I'm also keenly interested in how you get to that outcome. What is that process like? And that's what Storybeat focuses on is how people develop whatever it is they're trying to bring into the world. And how does it get from some notion in your head to a finished piece that many people hopefully can enjoy? That's really what it's all about for me. I love that. Yeah, the whole idea that there's a product inherent in it and so you're finding out what systemically has just happened that created that end result. I wanna know what created you as an end result because you spent a lifetime on musicals, writing, observing, being a part of, getting something on Broadway that's got one of the longest runs and not easy to do. Did you yourself attend musicals growing up? Was there a theater influence for Young Steady? Yeah, somewhat. The very first musicals, the first musical I remember knowing about was at a summer camp that I went to called Camp Kiwani and those that went to Kiwani will know all what I'm talking about. I was in a production at Camp Kiwani. I was all of eight or nine years old of guys and dolls with at a summer camp, you know, with all boys, no girls, there were no girls there. And it turned me on greatly to be able to be on stage. That wasn't really what triggered everything for me, but that was the beginning of it was, hey, this is kind of neat. There's lights and there's people out there. And by the way, if you say the lines right and it gets laughs, oh, that just your whole body just goes into a kind of atomic reverie. And so it got into my veins pretty early. I didn't really get going in the theater until I was around 14, 15 years old when I got involved in a children's theater company here in Pittsburgh, which is my hometown, though I spent many years not here. I got involved in a children's theater company and was doing everything. I did lighting and sets and costumes and were in the shows. I helped to write some of the shows. And that in my last couple of years of high school was really what got into the veins. That was, I was lost at that point in the world of theater and entertainment and drama and comedy. That's really where it happened. You and I both went to USC, Steve. And you were a performer there, but you also did electrical lighting design. And so with that background, how did you take that and suddenly learn how to write a musical? Well, there was no training for me in writing musicals. Everything that I know about writing musicals came from just doing it and from observing, obviously, but it didn't come from a book. It didn't come from a class. I have had a more than eclectic history with theater. So I've done all these different, played all these different roles in the world of theater. Again, I've been a lighting designer. I've worked on building sets and acting on stage and so on. And the musicals have always been really fascinating to me because there's, for me personally and for, I think for many people, there's something about that razzle-dazzle that happens once the lights go down, the orchestra starts playing and people start singing and dancing with all kinds of lighting because musicals tend to have heavy lights in them. And there's just something about it that's just pizzazz to me and it felt like it's a bubble in me that I've always wanted to be involved in. And to this day, I'm still involved in working on them. I'm working on a couple of musicals right now. I can't tell you too much about them because they're in the works, but there's something about musicals. Musicals, by the way, are more closely aligned to how they're built to movies than they are to plays. What do you mean by that? So structurally, musicals tend to be structured more like feature films are structured than like some plays are structured. So for instance, most plays, not most, many plays, and I'll give you a good example in a moment, many plays don't ever move forward. They just keep rising in some way or what we would call going vertical. So the play Waiting for Gatto is a really good example. It never really goes anywhere. You learn a whole lot of very interesting oddball things in Waiting for Gatto. And the world is in that play. It's my favorite play of all plays. And the world is in there. The philosophy of life and the world, it's all in there. But the play never moves forward. They're stuck waiting for Gatto. You could never, I shouldn't say never, but it would be very challenging to write that as a musical because musicals wanna move forward like a shark. Sharks must move forward or they die and movies must move forward or they die. You can't just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk in a movie, most people will turn it off. There are exceptions to that as there are exceptions to everything in art. So good example would be My Dinner with Andre, which is two guys talking for 80 minutes or something like that. But that's really rare. Most movies have to proceed forward. And musicals are like movies in the sense that they must move forward or they die on the vine. So in that sense, I find that relationship between something that I dearly love, motion pictures and something else that I dearly love, which is the theater and musicals, but that's really sort of the same thing with many different elements in it. Interesting. And you alluded to the fact you've got some projects. So you're writing right now. I am. How do you pick your subjects? Like from inception of your first musical, which is many decades ago, to now, what happens that inspires you? I have to research and take on the subject and this is gonna be my project because these projects are not short-lived. They're really long once you dive into something like this. Yeah, and the average today, anyway, the average length of time it takes from inception of a musical to getting to Broadway if it's ever going to get there and most don't. But if it's ever gonna get there, the average length is somewhere between seven and 12 years. It takes a long time to get there. It takes a long time just to write it. It takes a long time to get it money and backers and rehearsals and et cetera, et cetera. The answer to your question is I'm not sure. I know the answer. It's a gut feeling that sometimes there's something that just peaks your interest and you go, that's kind of interesting. Let's explore that. I can use it. Jekyll and Hyde is a good example of how that happened. So by the time that Frank Wildhorn and I started working on Jekyll and Hyde, which was in 1980, so that's 41 years ago that I was sitting in his one bedroom apartment in Westwood, California. And we had already written two shows that we'll never see the light of day. One called the High and Mighty Caesar based on the life of Julius Caesar. Go ahead and turn that into a musical. And the next one was called The Last Tsar, which was about the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, the Romanovs. And go ahead and turn that into a musical. They're just not gonna get very far unless there's something really spectacular you do with it. And we were sitting around after writing those two, saying, well, what are we gonna do next? And we didn't know, but you're always looking for inspiration from somewhere. And I believe in the notion that we as artists are conduits from wherever, God, the heavens, the universe, energy, whatever you wanna call it, I believe that we as artists are not actually the instigators of the art. We are the conduit for it. And so it's coming through you to the world somehow. And we were sitting around in his apartment and were thinking, what are we gonna do next? Well, Frank and I were extremely inspired at that time. This is 1980. We were inspired by a show that was relatively new. It had only been out for a year or a year and a half called Sweeney Todd, that was Steven Sondheim's show. And to this day, that's my favorite musical. I think that's one of the greatest pieces of anything that's ever been written. And we thought to ourselves, well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And we thought we would flatter Mr. Sondheim by doing something that was gothic and horror because that was like cool to both of us. And we started looking at different shows, concepts to work on. And it's always lovely if you can find something that's in the public domain because then you don't have to pay anybody for rights to it. And so we were looking at public domain horror stories. Where do you look for something like that? Well, you can always determine that through today. It's relatively easy because you can go to the library of congress.loc, I think it's .loc.gov or something like that. And search for a title to see whether there's a copyright on it or not. If you have a book, pretty much any book you have, unless it was published before the 1900s, it will have a copyright bug in it in the first, second, third page somewhere in there. So we started looking at horror stories. We thought about musicalizing Frankenstein and Dracula and the Wolfman. And we were looking at. We were looking at a little thing called the Phantom of the Opera about seven years before before Lloyd Webber wrote his version. We were actually considering doing the opera. Well, that'll never work. You know, that's what you're sitting around in. That won't work. So, you know, best laid plans of mice and men. And so I then said, well, what about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? And Frank said to me, well, what's that? And I said, well, I think there's an interesting potential there because you've got one man who is actually two who has a good female and a bad female from one from the upper end of the tracks and one from the lower end of the tracks. And he said, yeah, that's really good because you could do a love triangle, a romantic love triangle of sorts. And so I went and got the book and read it. And most people I've discovered over time think they know the book of the strange case, the full title of it is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Most people think they've read it at some point in their life. Most people think they know it. And the truth is very few people actually know the book. They may have read it, but most people have not. It's really short. It's only about 100 pages. It's really a novella. There are no women in it. There's no love story in it. There's no romance of any kind. There's a mention of a little girl on one page and there's a mention of a maid on another page. There are no women. It's in three sections, two diary entries and one sort of a memory retelling of what happened between three different characters, one being John Utterson, one being Hasty Lanyon and the other being Jekyll. And there's no ending. He disappears. So we had to concoct a story, whole cloth, out of the simple notion that the polarity and duality of man within all of us, we're one fine line away from being crazy, mad, murderous that we've seen over the course of history. Many people have committed murder of one kind or another in a rage that they would otherwise never have done and they wind up paying a penalty for that. But Jekyll and Hyde is, and Stevenson writes about it, that it is about the polarity that's within all of us and that we are constantly as humans fighting that polarity. We, you know, everybody has a little devil in them and everybody wants to do something a little devilish in their life and sometimes it comes out when you're much younger and sometimes it comes out when you're much older but we as humans are always suppressing the evil part of we as humans that we have that duality. And that then becomes universal. Everybody understands that. And so that's how we got to start on Jekyll and Hyde, the musical. And how do you musicalize that? Well, you got to come up with a story that makes sense. Yeah. So I just want to, you know, refer back to your book. So for people who are enjoying this conversation, now, if you're not watching us and you're listening to the podcast, it will be in the show notes. So you can get this book and it's also being announced at the beginning as well as at the end, but this is beating Broadway, how to create stories for musicals that get standing ovations. This is written by Steve Kudin. So if you're interested in the genre, this is an amazing book. And there's tremendous also, I love examples, they're very helpful. So you start to understand the pattern of what you're talking about. So before Steve, you alluded to the fact that you and Frank were throwing around some ideas, some of which never saw the light of day. What are the actual statistics for a musical to see the light of day, to make it to stage and get a paid audience? Well, okay, just to the stage as in there's a production of it somewhere, whether it's at your local community center or whether it's in a local school or whether it winds up being on the road or all the way to Broadway or a local repertory theater, something like that. There are, I don't know the actual numbers but I'll give you a couple of clues. Let's just say it's close to impossible and to have a show get to Broadway and hit is like hitting the lottery. So there are in the whole long history of Broadway which is over a hundred years, it's 110 or 20 years at this point. In the whole long history of Broadway there are only about 80 to 90 shows somewhere in there that have gotten to what they call long run status. A long run status means you've played for 800 performances minimum. Well, there are only eight performances a week possible. So there's seven days in the week, they don't perform on Monday so you're doing two matinees a week so that's six days plus two matinees, right? So that's eight shows a week times 52 is 416 shows possible a year. So to get to 800 performances is a little less than two years. So for a show to run that long is really challenging and for a show to go from inception to production I think that those odds are already really long though they're not as long as getting to Broadway obviously. The, you know, it's the conceptualization it's the figuring out what the story is. It is the saying, okay, who are the characters in this thing? Do we need to write this in some meaningful way like you write the libretto first you write the play and then do you come in and figure out where the songs belong and then you start to write the music or do you just sit down and just start knocking there's a million ways to go at it. But the truth is once you start down that road it's usually many months of development to get to where you have music attached to a book what you call the book unless it's an operetta or some form of totally sung through opera like Les Mis or who's Tommy which are sung through most shows have some kind of dialogue in them they don't have to obviously and there are very few musicals that don't have at least 15 to 17 songs minimum some have many more than that just depends on what the material calls for. There are no two shows that are the same I like to say in the book which I think is really important for people to understand there is a form that we all as writers follow whether we're informed of the form or not we follow it there is no formula and the difference between a form and a formula which is what throws people off sometimes is that the form says here's the way the pattern of understanding happens so we in the West we communicate with each other by telling each other stories what happened to you today? Oh, well this happened this happened and that happened and this happened and you tell that story when you turn on the news what do they tell you? Tonight's top story is it's all about storytelling and there is a form to the way that we communicate with each other that we learn as children and we don't even think about it we do it naturally there is a beginning, middle and end to a story if you started the story at the end and then told the middle and then told the beginning nobody would understand what you were talking about so there is a form to the way that musicals exist in so that audiences understand the storytelling because a musical by the way is not really a musical in my opinion unless you're telling a story if you just have a bunch of songs that you're playing that's called a concert that's not a musical a musical has characters it has a story it has character arc it has a beginning, middle and end et cetera, et cetera a formula is and this is a good way to think about formula you now have your show you have Jekyll and Hyde the musical and it's succeeded on Broadway and somebody comes along and says hey, we want to take it out on the road and put it into a lot of theaters across America one week at a time and we want to put it into the west end of London and we want to have it play in the Asian countries and we want it to be everywhere at the same time those productions are beholden to what that standard was on Broadway and that then is a formula so the formula becomes it's a repetition of things so but the form can be as malleable and adaptable to pretty much any and every story and once you understand that form it's a lot easier to construct a story yeah, I grew up on Long Island in New York and what we did as a family my mother who was a music teacher would take me into New York City and to Manhattan and we would go to plays I was really cultured as a little little girl I went to opera, I went to ballet I went to drama I saw lots of musicals and I was obsessed with musicals as a child What was your first? Wow Not trying to stump the host today No, at all and you know, I'd have to, I'm so cute I saved playbills, that's how much I have every playbill I've ever seen Right, oh my God and I remember standing at the back door for the actors to come out like it was everything to me I remember, and this was completely not my first play but I do remember seeing the me nobody knows I remember seeing runaways like everything and anything that was there Pippin, whatever my mom would just take me into the city and that was our day and then we'd go out for a meal and then drive back to Long Island but I loved this and this feeling you're talking about I'm so intimate with when the lights go halfway down and the orchestra starts to play the overture and it's like, oh, I'm compelling This Yiddish word Overflowing Overjoyed We're having this conversation during COVID and there are no shows anywhere and we're all missing that communal experience It's one thing to sit at home and watch Hamilton on Disney Plus by yourself, which is how I watched it Which I did too, twice Right, but there's something about that crowd There's just something and by the way, one of the fascinating things about because when I talk to lots of actors on Storybeat one of the fascinating things that they talk about that I think is truly telling you know when you're in a show and you know this when you're in a show repetitively and by the way, that's a form of formula where you're doing the show over and over again When you're in a show every audience makes the show different that night by their reactions and how the chemistry between the performers and the chemistry between the performers and the audience it's different every performance but the audience who more than likely is only going to see it once that's their total memory They don't see all these differences They don't see the very fine differences between one performance after another You, the performer, feel those differences But imagine if somebody said to you you were going to be a theater actor for the rest of your life and you were going to do shows for the rest of your life and there was never going to be an audience there Oh You'd say forget it Yeah, you lost me on that last one Right, exactly So the audience By the way, Aristotle wise that he was 2700 years ago said you need a messenger a message, a messenger and a receiver So you need to have the story the person writing the story and you need an audience and without those three you don't have a complete circuit so you have to have the audience So give us I'm so curious because you've talked about storytelling several times and I know your book goes into length What are some fundamentals for really great storytelling? And I have to say you know, a few of my questions also they go into the realm that I am I have a few careers most of them are all around visibility It's actually just one platform but it's a route visibility writing a book getting the book to international bestseller and being interviewed That's what I coach and that's what I do out in the world So for people who are authors and for people who want to write musicals or plays or maybe they're speaking on stage what are some of the elements the fundamentals of great storytelling? Well, the biggest one and what is a challenge for both you and me in doing a podcast like the ones we do is that the singular thing I have lots of consultant clients on various screenplays and on musicals The thing that's missing in most stories that succeed or it's not missing in those stories it's missing from those people trying to make it succeed is conflict and you and I do shows here that have little to no conflict in them So it then becomes a challenge to have people become interested in them because if you think about what's really fascinating to people most people are looking in their entertainment world to get outside of themselves they're mundane or difficult or challenging or troubled lives whatever it would be they want a little respite from it so they go to a movie or they watch a TV show or they read a book or whatever that would be and what they're looking for most people are looking for is a character, usually a protagonist in search of a goal and that there is nothing but conflict in the way and if you have that in your story where it's non-stop conflict from beginning to end the audience will love you they will love you because if you resolve that conflicted search for a resolution to a goal if you resolve that in a satisfying way and that's a key word satisfying if what you are coming whatever resolution you get to at the end of your story if it's satisfying you will become all kinds of rich you will make more money than you know what to do with and those are the key underpinnings of all great successful memorable popular stories is that there is a character in search of a goal with obstacles and conflict in the way that reaches an ultimate resolution whether happy or unhappy because there are lots of really successful stories that do not end happily that whole myth about the Hollywood happy ending it's true in a lot of Hollywood movies but there's a lot of successful Hollywood movies that are not happy endings at all two good examples Chinatown not a happy ending the Godfather not a happy ending so you can find all these really you know difficult ends but highly successful why because the ending is satisfying to the audience and those are the elements that aren't there now the other thing we have already alluded to it is structure if you structure your story in a poor way structure is everything it's the foundation and the structure of the house that you're building your story on if that's not there it will fall apart foundation there is a foundation to storytelling and then a structure to the building of it storytelling screenplays frequently are said are akin to architecture there's an architecture to the way you build a successful story and without that architecture it will fall apart with rare exceptions there are as I say exceptions to every one of these rules now Steve when you do that when you create the foundation and then the architecture for your story do you roadmap it so in advance do you sit down and just sort of bullet point well this has to happen this has to happen this has to happen in order to get us here or is it just something you allow yourself to flow with and see where it takes so there I like to say the number one rule of storytelling is there are no rules cool so there's no there's no one right way to do any of this it's how you are able to best do it and if it works for you that way it works for you that way in my specific case I'm an outliner I need to outline I need to know where I'm going as you say a roadmap I need to know that or I then am uncertain of what I'm doing some people like to just go they just okay I've got a notion I've got a character and I'm just going to start putting them into some kind of jeopardy or trouble or make it difficult for them and I'm just going to see what turns out there are novelists that work that way where there's no outline and I would say a significant number of novelists and screenwriters and playwrights and so on do outline and then the outline becomes a guide it's not it's not concrete and in fact the so there are two different major artistic parts of storytelling one is an art form and the other is a craft and you need to be a master of both both the art form and the craft in order to be successful and the craft is something that I can teach you pretty quickly craft is relatively easy to learn though not particularly easy to master it's easy to understand and it's easy to learn but not particularly easy to master the art form is very challenging and some people are naturally gifted at it and some are not and it really does require you saying to yourself okay, in my case the part of the craft is developing an outline and so then I feel like I've mastered what it is I'm attempting to do I know where my beginning, middle and end is and every story has a beginning, middle and end I don't care what anybody else says and then how do I get from the beginning of the story to the end of the story which by the way are really tricky because most people don't realize that it's easy to say it's so simple to say yes, every story has a beginning, middle and end but okay, where do you start? Well, I'll go back to Aristotle for a moment he more or I'm paraphrasing of course but he more or less said you don't wanna start your story before it begins and you don't wanna end your story after it ends I mean, he says that in a simplistic way but there's truth to that where do you start and how do you end and those two are so important to the success of the story the where and where beginning and end and then what do you proceed to do in between those two points because you and everybody listening to this has seen more than one movie or TV show that kind of like the beginning of it it was grinding on and on and where's the story it hasn't started yet well, they started too late I'm interested and you've also seen stories that went on and on at the end after the climax and was like, well, get over yourselves we're done and they've gone on too long so that's part of it too and it's the same for you Mike, you and I were so on the same page because you're talking about the elements that I teach my writing students and write on it Yes, so important this is Joseph Campbell's hero's journey essentially and you know, sometimes it's really interesting I can think of one example one student amongst many is a great example who extremely upbeat extremely powerful and positive and when I read the writing I don't even want to allude to the gender of the person but when I read the writing I'm like, where's the conflict because there's a lot of glory here and how you create what you create that's awesome but as a reader there's nothing inherently here for me you've got to take me on a ride and anytime you go from point A to point Z right and over the hill there it's going to be like, you know two steps forward and five obstacles back and two steps forward I mean, conflict is everything I'm going to give your listeners a really good clue on something great you want to this is going to sound worse than it is you want to have absolutely no mercy for your protagonist no mercy I tell my students this regularly when you start your story you want to think about your story that you have your protagonist under tremendous pressure where you're actually squashing them down they're on the ground and you've got them squashed underneath something and you're squashing them and as the story progresses you want to press down harder and harder and harder and harder so that it gets more and more difficult by the way, that's akin to what's known as rising action that as the story progresses it gets more intense and more conflicted and more difficult, more challenging and when you continue to apply pressure character under pressure when you do that for an entire story what will happen is the audience will be breathless and they will absolutely adore you and so success comes from that pressure so when you tell me that you know a writer who's writing the happy stuff or the glory stuff or the successful stuff people aren't interested in that because they're trying to get away from that they're trying to find that in their own lives they're usually not having it in their own lives and so they escape into the movies to see someone else survive challenges and difficulties and they will reach here's another great clue for me the singular reason why we go to movies read books, watch TV shows their singular reason is to achieve this lovely little thing from the Greeks called catharsis that to me I call that the storytelling drug that is what we're addicted to we come back, we'll watch a movie repeatedly because we will get to that cathartic moment at the end it's a wonderful life I watch once a year at Christmas time you get to the very end George Bailey you're the richest man in town and I just start the ball and it's catharsis and that catharsis which is an emotional purging and so if you've ever been to a movie and you walked out of the theater feeling like you were on a cloud like it was lighter than air like oh wow I'm so relieved it's so wonderful I'm gonna tell all my friends and family about this that's catharsis if you can achieve catharsis you can become very wealthy catharsis is a major key major key because if you don't achieve catharsis then you're not gonna get to that word I used earlier satisfaction satisfaction comes from catharsis catharsis and so we've got hashtag great storytelling and hashtag big idea because another like really important thing that you said was you have to capture people in the beginning this cannot meander because whether it's the beginning of a book or a movie or a musical we've gotta grab people right from the get go and of course so many techniques to do that so Steve so here you were a BA at USC later you go to UCLA professional program and screenwriting a lot later a lot later 30 years later still trajectory right then you get an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA hats off to you and so after school all of that's done you have all your certificates how did you branch out into TV screenwriting what was that big break that happened? Oh I had the 30 years worth of TV screenwriting before I went back to school interesting so why then back to school well because okay that's a great question and by the way there are any number of people that have the same experience that I'm about to explain in Hollywood in particular there is this little thing that happens as you age you start to become less desirable by certain less relevant yes yeah I don't know about relevant it's just that so people will talk about ageism in Hollywood and I was trained and do believe that there isn't there is a degree of it but there's much less ageism than there is pyramidism so what does that mean? as you get into the business as a young person and you better get in young as a writer because you are eventually going to become less as you said relevant if you get in at a young age you start to meet people who are your contemporaries and as your contemporaries start to rise in the business and you start to rise in the business you are sort of equals but as you rise up that chain up that pyramid because you're going toward it at a peak not it's not flat you start to rise in importance and whether you're paid more and whether you're expected to do more and whether you're supposed to deliver a different thing and you become a different person as you do more and as that happens not to everybody but to a fairly significant number of people their friends that have been you and your friends are sort of helping one another along as you rise up this pyramid they start to flake away or things happen they get families and they decide they don't want to work as hard or they get sick or they just they're sick of the business or whatever it is and they flake away and as they flake away you lose some of that contemporary juju I guess it would be where you're on that same level with someone and suddenly the people who are now in charge of the shows are 15, 20 years younger than you and they want to help their contemporaries so you are unable to get as much work that's what happens it goes up this pyramid and I started to experience some of that where I was making I was working on less and less material every year that was for pay and I started looking around for something to do with my life because I'm not a sit around person and I thought I wonder if I would be any good as a teacher and I thought I would be a good teacher but I didn't know whether I could teach because I'd never taught and I decided, well, all right I'm gonna see if I can go back to school and get an MFA because I didn't want to teach at the high school level I wanted to teach at a college level or higher and it's almost impossible to get a decent teaching job at a college anywhere unless you have what they call a terminal degree that's a MFA or a PhD so I went back to UCLA I was delighted that they had accepted me I'd already written 90 teleplays Jack Longhide was already a massive worldwide hit when I went back to school and got the MFA in order to be eligible to get a good job at some university and within six months of my graduating in 2010 a job came available here at Point Park University in Pittsburgh which just happens to be my hometown I applied for the job and the fools hired me so then I came back and I've taught for 10 years here and recently I've stepped down from full-time teaching in order to get back to creativity but I'm still teaching on the side so it turns out and I'm not one to really tout myself that highly but I'm a pretty good teacher I think the proof of it is when you see students come into a school as a freshman and know very little and four years later when they graduate they know a whole lot and you know that it's their work their hard work and dedication but also you have contributed to that by teaching them things You're also a story and script consultant which I love knowing by the way because I don't know if you find this but people will come to me knowing what I do and then assume well because Debbie teaches books clearly you must teach screenwriting different animal very different animal very different absolutely I've researched the heck out of it but you know it's not my expertise so great now I have a colleague to send people to but how does that work does somebody bring you a finished script and you help them tweak it or do they come to you with just I've got this idea I don't know how to flesh it out I need to hire a mentor or both it's sort of all of the above but with a big caveat on it I think it's less helpful to people if they come to me with their their notion their idea their concept their outline though I've looked at those two and say can you help me to make this better and the answer is yes but it's expensive for them it's time consuming and it's usually less helpful for me to look at the unfinished work it's much more efficient for me to receive a completed script that they go I don't there's something wrong I don't know what it is I'm getting bad feedback from people I've had friends or family or or professionals read it and reject it and and what am I doing wrong I will tell you 90% of the time it has to do with the lack of conflict like we've already talked about 90% of the time but then there are lots of other elements along the way one of the challenging things about being a consultant is that if you're not a long time professional and you have been rejected many times or you have been rewritten many times or you have received copious notes from others it's sometimes challenging for newer writers to accept notes so I'm going to give you a clue to the best way to accept notes which I think is really a valuable thing to teach people and that is when you are in a note taking session or somebody's giving you notes it's the smart thing to do is to listen carefully that's a keyword listen carefully to or read every note that you're given and to consider every note that you're given because every note means somebody took exception or saw something inadequate or in need of help or it's not quite right every note has validity whether you the writer who now has their baby you've got their baby in your hands and please don't hurt the baby and please don't tell me I'm not a good writer and please tell me this is the most wonderful thing you've ever read don't criticize the baby don't criticize the baby and the truth of the matter is you've come to me for a reason which is something's not right you're you're you have no confidence about something and I'm giving you my expertise and feedback does that make me the end all and be all absolutely not does it make me the answer to your prayers probably not though maybe I'm going to give you my best feedback on what I see and and say to you give it another you know another draft usually it's not one more draft it's usually numerous drafts I will tell you the I spoke a short while ago about art and craft the craft of screenwriting to me or script writing is writing write the first draft figure out how to knock out this first draft and that's that's already a really high bar to get over but thus the art of storytelling screenwriting book writing the art is in rewriting yep and all great writers will tell you that writing is rewriting and you can if you start to study up on the great writers of all time they will all tell you the same thing there are occasionally you'll bump into someone who's inordinately fantastic and successful who writes so slowly and considers each sentence so much that by the time they're done they never rewrite that's really rare William Styron wrote that way he never rewrote he took just enormous amounts of time to write each sentence wow right so that's not how I work I'm a believer in what are known as is purge drafts or puke drafts I'm a believer in flow I believe get it out I'll give you I'll tell you how I look at it I think of so everybody most everybody can relate to the notion of in school when you're a kid you go to an art class and the teacher gives you this big misshapen lump of clay to make a sculpture or they give you a you know a rectangle with a worth of clay and you make a sculpture out of it so you've got this nothing you've got a lump and you turn it into something that looks like something or it's a cup or an astray or whatever you turn it into as a writer you don't even have the clay so your first draft from my perspective is you are now manufacturing the clay the misshapen lumpy ugly you don't know what it is clay that's your first draft and then all the other drafts after it and I'm a I'm a revision draft junkie I do revision and lots of revisions all those revisions are taking that clay that you've made and shaping it into a something that you believe is a fine thing and that is for me that's a way to get past the challenge of the first draft which I don't like first drafts it's painful to me first drafts are challenging and they're hard and they never come out for me they never come out right and it's like oh god what am I doing now so I have to go back and start to be an artist and the art the art form of it is shaping that clay so that it becomes a fine work of art you and I are so on the same page thank you I really appreciate what you're sharing and for folks who are not familiar or are already doing this and are looking for more depth more direction and guidance you are definitely receiving some great great tips here today so you can listen and re-listen something I'm fascinated about Steve is the fact that somehow you've parlayed your teaching being a professor and writing your books and your musicals and your screenplays etc and then you've also moderated Q&As at Carnegie Music Hall how did you come into that awesome I would love to do that auspicious job to be sitting in front of these great artists and celebrities and asking them questions in front of an audience well you're talking about Carnegie Music Hall here in Pittsburgh not in New York that's correct I've yet to be on the stage at Carnegie Hall you know how do you get to Carnegie Hall practice practice practice the the answer is by doing a podcast ah really yeah because well I do you do an interview show I do an interview show but how did you pitch your hat for that they came to me I didn't pitch anything okay well good I hope they hear me on your show somewhere here on the west coast and someone thinks of me because I was love so you know and I haven't truthfully the honest truth of it is I haven't really explored how to go about becoming on a circuit there are people that are on a circuit where they both give seminars and they give talks I've given many seminars and talks here in Pittsburgh I was at the first producer's perspective I guess it was called the super super conference or whatever was called in New York three four years ago and gave a seminar on on storytelling for musicals and so there are circuits for that and there are folks that are agents in that and there are bureaus that handle those sorts of things I've never really explored those but they exist and you could easily start to look for that if that's what you want to do if you want to go on the road well it's pretty hard to do right now with COVID but when that when we get past this it might be a lot of fun to to travel and so you get asked to go here there and and and else wise the the thing about being an interviewer is if you can make yourself known in that world then you're the person here's the way I think about interviewing in that in those circumstances it's not about you at all it's about whoever the subject is and so I had the great good fortune to in my very first interview ever was at Point Park but was with the spectacular very generous wonderful human being who everyone knows Brian Cranston so from Breaking Bad and many other things and Malcolm in the middle and many other things he came in and I interviewed him for an hour in front of a live audience at school and that was my first ever interview of anyone and I had no idea what I was doing and it was it was you know I was just very fortunate that I was able to figure my way through it and nobody taught me what to do I just did it and part of that you have the exact same thing going on it's just innate curiosity if you don't have that curiosity you're not going to be an interviewer that's for sure and I think if you if that's fascinating to you so that to me the people that I interview you know to me they're all fascinating they're all successful in one way shape or form nobody I don't have anybody on the show who's a would be or has never had any success in a career I don't have those because what are they gonna what are they gonna share with the audience that's useful in my specific show for Story B which is about how the process of creativity and unless you are successful then that process is probably not well formed and so and it's possible that you could be very well formed but you just have had no success I think that's doubtful I think if you are well formed in what you're doing as a creator of some kind then you have found success because the two go hand in hand the success and the formation of that process or hand in hand it's hard work to become successful at anything you ever read Malcolm Gladwell's book The Outliers I think it's just called Outliers yeah and that's all about what does it take to become a master at anything 10,000 hours of work well that's hard that's that's dedication it's passion it's energy if you don't have passion if you don't have desire and drive at pretty much anything but in particular in any form of the arts you're not likely to succeed you're not you have to be dedicated because you can't go down to the corner to the creative store and buy yourself a career you know there's no substitute for doing the work there's just none you have to do the work well interestingly enough I will say that something that came to me by virtue of doing my show was red carpet interviews there you go and I have to say you know I loved them because I started to realize early on I mean like anything in life some people just have an extremely comfortable extroverted personality it's nothing for them to step into that one little space and a step and repeat and you know deliver something great in a few minutes and walk to the next person but there would definitely and I won't mention names there were celebrities who that was not so far and so I found it incumbent on me to create a space that was very safe but also really conducive for them to have some kind of a flow and a connection that they would share something that was a great sound bite and if they didn't I found a way oh sometimes I would lie and say you know what we had a camera problem I'm so sorry can we do a retake and I would just give them a little bit of direction and a lot of love love is very good for creating a safe space but I found much like what you're saying Steve I I was surprised at how easy it came to me and how much I loved it and for me I guess too if I were to be honest you know the glam of getting dressed up and for me also to be in the spotlight I've had the three tenors sing to me and you know some other really extraordinary moments with people and just it's incredible it opens doors so there you are on stage at Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh you're interviewing Brian Cranston and then ta-da he comes on your show he comes on your podcast well Brian Cranston was at Point Park not at Carnegie Music Hall but Capish right right yeah so and then he also has been on the show as well so you know that's just a generous human being he also by the way he's a raconteur and he has great stories to tell and that helps what I'm sure you bumped into more than a few times on the red carpet is folks who have been burned by interviewers or who are innately shy they don't want to really talk about themselves they're very good when they can memorize someone else's words and then they can say them as another character but they themselves don't feel very confident about who they are those the industry's filled with stars who are like that who are a little reluctant to be interviewed and there are stars who are never interviewed they just don't do them you know do you have a favorite interview moment whether it was awkward or hilarious or meaningful with a celebrity whether you were writing directing or you were doing your show or your Q and A's a favorite moment that I've had everything I've ever done yeah I would say well it's not on Storybeat I've had many favorite moments including talking to Ryan Cranston that was that was one of those where it was a little bit surreal for me because he's such a huge star and such a nice person you know he was so easy to deal with on the show I would say the I would say the most memorable thing for me was walking the red carpet on Broadway for Jekyll and Hyde that was that was a little out of body experience you know it doesn't happen every day and so that's the kind of thing you dream about and you're not really sure whatever happened and there it is and that sort of takes your breath away a little bit and then and then of course like all great things in life it's there and then it's gone and the next day you go back to just being swampy you you know and most that's the fascinating thing about big events and award shows and that kind of thing is that and you'll hear you'll hear stars talk about it too where they win the Oscar and the next day they're having to take the trash out because you still have to live your life so I would say that's the the pinnacle for me was that particular moment I would say one other extraordinary moment it was extraordinary and it lasted a months was I got to work side by side for about six months on three plays in Repertory with directed by two written by of the three by John Cassavetes and and one of the shows starred Peter Falcon and his wife Shira one show starred Generalans and John Voight and one show starred Generalans and a very fine actor named I want to say Michael McDonald but I designed the lighting for all three shows in rep in a little tiny 66 seat theater in Hollywood and I was with these people for six months side by side with Cassavetes and that was absolutely amazing and was because it happened so young in my life I was 25 years old at the time it became a seminal event in my existence because I learned a whole lot about working with professionals doing that because I hadn't really working worked with a lot of professionals at that point and after that I worked with tons of them but that was the first big for a and the most amusing thing in that whole experience was Cassavetes had he was a film guy and he had done some theater but he was a film guy and he and I and I was a theater guy I hadn't really done any film or TV at that point it was all theater and he and I were on completely different pages in the language to use and and I would say things and he wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about so I'll give you a great example there was a light one light that was often an angle upstage in this one little narrow part of the set of this one show and I was talking one day about well we could put a gobo up in there well gobo for those who don't know is a pattern so when you go to a theater and you see a light and it looks like leaves you know or it looks like a building has been lit that way those are patterns that go into the lights and they're called gobos and I talked about gobos and that I wanted to use this one light to sculpt the way the actors look because it came in at a an oblique side angle and it literally cast a shadow where you'd get a light dark across the face so it was it sculpted the actor it made them actually look like a sculpture and he would say to me all the time Steve let's go up there and gobo that light he'd say gobo that light and I finally got frustrated one day and I said John I'm trying to use that as sculpting the actor it's not a gobo and he actually turned to me and he put his hand on his hip and he said Steve please don't be artsy fartsy I have never ever forgotten that Steve please don't be artsy fartsy that was like because we were not on the same page with the language and he was using the word as a verb you're going to go go something correct he was using it as a verb but it's not and and it was just a marvelous marvelous experience and you know working with those personalities and the differences between the way that Peter Falk and Jenna Rollins and John Voight three massive stars the way that they each all three of them approached how they got to the stage differently how they got to the character totally differently it was fascinating to watch and much and a lot of fun and we're at the end here and I do want to fit in these two really brief questions so if you can give me brief answers because I'm fascinated your bio said Steve you're also an artist what kind of artist are you so if you go to stevekuden.com you can go and search in the pulldowns Steve's art or it's Steve's art or something like that can't remember what the exact thing says but it's art and I have been taking photographs for years and years and years and years and I take those photographs and I put them into Photoshop and I turn them into paintings and there's lots of them that you can see on stevekuden.com so that's the kind of art that I do and recently I have found I've had a lot of fun taking those paintings those photo paintings and I I actually have them printed on canvas and they look like paintings so it's really great multi-talented well this is Dare to Dream I know you've already alluded to the fact that you can't tell me about the projects you're working on or you'll have to kill me though since I very much want to breathe to live to see tomorrow what do you next dare to dream how can you describe what's next for you in your heart or you'd like to create in your life my goal is to get back to Broadway my goal is I'm also writing a feature and I'm in the middle of figuring out a novel and my goal is to have all three that's get back to Broadway have get a feature film produced and produce at least one or more novels that's that's that's my dream right now is to because the teaching took me a little bit off the creative world I'm still doing it but at a lot smaller pace slower pace and now I'm ramping that back up again so that that's my that's my dream wow so this is your second time in the show you so deliver this is such a cool conversation I really you make it easy Debbie so when you get these three new projects running even if it's not concurrent but we have to have you back to have the next you know phase of your life conversation I look forward to it already and you know thank you Steve well thank you Debbie love to be back and always love chatting with you always yeah so go check out more about him stevecutin.com his books both of them are available on Amazon the one we talked about today is Beating Broadway and I end the show with this quote from the musical Wicked I'm through accepting limits because someone says they're so some things I cannot change but till I try I'll never know yeah subscribe to the Dare to Dream podcast to hear this weekly number one transformation conversation thank you so much for all you post down below I read all of them I get back to you as I can and do subscribe and tell your friends and family about this show send it to them my guest next week is Pax the divine wisdom source out in the world through the writings of author Penelope Gene Hayes and channeler Carol Serene Borgans Carol's been channeling the spirit energy Pax since the early 1990s and the purpose of this connection was to channel Pax wisdom and put it into book form so messages could be shared with the world it's pretty profound information for right now so definitely tune in and remember don't just dare to dream dare to turn all your dreams into your reality and if you're listening to the podcast and you like to see me Debbie Daschinger and my guest go to YouTube and join the videos there youtube.com slash Debbie Daschinger