04 August 2010
Posted in Writers - Nastaran Dibai & Jeffrey B. Hodes
“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.” – Ray Bradbury
Based on the book: Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas.
Part II
No Meaner Place: In the previous article and conversation with the husband and wife writing team of Dibai and Hodes, we discussed the process of adapting the book written by Firoozeh Dumas and how, unfortunately, the third time was not the charm, as the pilot had been still born twice before it was finally produced. They shared how personal the adaptation was, given the fact that Nastaran, herself, is Iranian and that Jeffrey, at this point, is an honorary Iranian, knowing and having shared so many experiences with Nastaran’s family. In discussing “Funny in Farsi” almost exclusively in the last article, I wanted to take more time and talk to Nastaran and Jeffrey about their careers. As a prelude to that continued conversation, it would be appropriate to lead off with the original cold opening/establishing shots of the pilot. Think of it as a love song to America:
Stock Shot: An Antique Map of the U.S.A.
Adult Firoozeh: (V.O.): This country was built by immigrants. We all came from somewhere else or came from someone who came from somewhere else.
As the camera zooms down into the map, the map becomes 3-D. We’re flying through a 3-D map of hills, valleys. We zip down to New York Harbor and fly around the Statue of Liberty.
Adult Firoozeh: (V.O.) And why did we all come here? Because America was a place of freedom where you could reach your full potential. Even Lady Liberty came over from France and got a job her first day here.
As we zoom back out and fly westward over the map of America, iconic landmarks pop up: the man-mad Erie Canal busts its way to the Great Lakes, the Sears Tower sprouts up on Chicago, the Arch forms itself on St. Louis. Interstates start connecting the cities on the map.
Adult Firoozeh: (V.O.) Just look at all this! It’s no accident that people came to America from every corner of the world. They needed a canvas this vast to fill with all their colors.
The camera moves past Mount Rushmore.
Adult Firoozeh: (V.O.) Like this fantastic thing? Designed and carved by the son of Danish immigrants. And it was immortalized in “North by Northwest,” a great American movie directed by a British guy and starring a Welsh guy, both of whom had to come here to make their mark in the world. You see where I’m going with this?
The camera flies past the Golden Gate Bridge, down the California coast. It flies over L.A. as the letters of the Hollywood sign rise up. We settle in on Newport Beach.
Adult Firoozeh: (V.O.) And it was in this spirit my family emigrated to the U.S. We hadn’t contributed anything great yet, but that was the cool thing about America. The field was wide open.
Life Lessons for Writers: The field is still wide open!
More Conversation with the Writers:
Neely: You both have fantastic credits, ranging from “Roc Live,” “Living Single,” “3rd Rock from the Sun,” to “The Nanny,” “According to Jim” and “Rita Rocks.” What was your first staff job?
Jeffrey/Nastaran: “Roc” the year it was live was our first staff job.
Nastaran: We were only on it the year it was live.
Neely: I didn’t even remember that they did it live.
Jeffrey: There was one season it was live and that was our first staff gig. It gave us skills that we use to this day because we got to do live TV, which almost no one does. We learned to write fast and maintain strong structure. The scene would be over and they would say “look we need two more pages because Charles Dutton has to do a walking costume change behind the set.” You had to find a reason to extend the scene that didn’t feel artificial. It was a real trial by fire, so by the time we got our second staff gig, we were hardened criminals like Charles Dutton.
Nastaran: Don’t put that in.
Jeffrey: No. Put that in; it’s funny. He’s a great actor. His background is not a mystery.
Neely: As I just mentioned, you have great credits.
Jeffrey: Actually we don’t have great credits. I’m not saying the shows we worked on weren’t good, because they were all great learning experiences but we haven’t had the kind of credits where people think we’re really hot. No one goes “Oh my God. They were the guys on “Raymond” or “Friends.” But every show we were on taught us something, so they were all valuable and I wouldn’t trade any of those experiences; well, maybe one or two.
Neely: When did you start writing as a team?
Jeffrey: In 1990, actually 1989. We got married in 1990, so we’ve been a married writing team for …
Nastaran: You’re giving away our age.
Jeffrey: I don’t care.
Nastaran: We were 12 when we met.
Jeffrey: Okay, we were 12. When we started, we were both assistants at Grant Tinker’s old company GTG Entertainment, it was where the Culver Studios are now. As a way of hitting on Nastaran, I showed her some notes for a spec I was writing. And then we both realized we were good at different things that went together well. Four months later, I proposed.
Nastaran: While we were dating, we were writing our first spec, which is really going to date us. It was a “Murphy Brown.” And every time we got together for a date, we wrote a scene..
Neely: How does your particular team work? Do you write in the same room, talk about it at dinner, mine your child and siblings for stories?
Jeffrey: It works differently now than it did then.
Neely: How did it work then and how does it work now?
Jeffrey: Why don’t you answer this.
Nastaran: We’re not the kind of people who split up acts and go and write separately. I could not write a word without Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Aw, that’s nice.
Nastaran: We sit there and we write every single line together. When it comes to breaking stories, we used to do everything together, but now we’ll talk about the general idea and then I’ll say let me take a stab at the outline. Then I’ll give it to Jeffrey and he’ll look at it and be a bit more objective and he’ll say, “This is where I see a hole or this is repetitive.” And then he’ll take a stab at it. We used to work out our outlines together, but now we’ll discuss the story, we’ll break it; but then in terms of filling in the details, we go back and forth.
Jeffrey: Usually one of us will write the initial outline. Over the years I’ve acquired some of Nastaran’s skills and she’s acquired some of mine. But in general, I would say that Nastaran is the more structural thinker and I’m more the one who can make the characters walk and talk and say funny things. Nastaran has a clear sense of a framework and I’m the one who says, “You know what might move this structure forward is a moment like this.” And she’ll say, “That’s great; let’s do that.”
Nastaran: Just the other day I was going through my desk, trying to clean it out, and I found the initial notes for “Funny in Farsi.” This pilot was sold about three years ago; they bought it before the strike. We handed in a first draft the night before the strike. Anyway, I was looking over the notes to see what I initially wrote (3 years ago) – what the story should be – and it’s pretty much the story we wrote for the pilot. I’ll look at something and say to myself, I think this is the story, I think this is the shape; but then Jeffrey is unbelievable at helping me fill it in. In terms of actual sitting down to write, we literally write every line together.
Jeffrey: Every line.
Neely: Do you work at home?
Jeffrey: Yes, when we don’t have a job.
Nastaran: When we’re writing pilots, we work at home. For the last couple of years we’ve been working at a studio. The way we work when we’re on a show is a different process. When we’re on staff, the story is usually broken in the room but then we’ll write the script together. When we’re running a show, Jeffrey and I tend not to write scripts. We like to oversee and let other people write the scripts. We’re not the kind of showrunners who have to write 6 or 10 or every episode and have our name on everything. We like to give it out to other people…
Jeffrey: …mostly because, first of all, we have enough to do when we’re running a show. Other showrunner friends of ours say that when you’re running a show every script is yours. Now that’s not literally true; there’s a writer who’s gone out and worked very hard on a draft. But it’s our job to oversee and make sure all the scripts have a consistent tone and fit in the way we want to do it. There are showrunners who can do it, and I’m going to go on record and say they’re more talented than at least I am. I don’t know how you can run a show and write every episode. I don’t believe it happens as often as it’s advertised.
Neely: When you’re in a comedy room, and everyone’s pitching stories, are you mining your own family, your kid, your brothers and sisters?
Jeffrey: One of the ways we like to run shows efficiently is that we want the writers to go home and live and be happy to come back the next day and say, “Oh, I had a fight with my husband.” Or “My wife and I argued over blank.” And we’ll go, "Okay, great, let’s talk about what that fight is really about."
Nastaran: That’s especially true when you’re working on a family sitcom. I can tell you that when we were on staff on “According to Jim” (we were there for the first four years), there were many many stories used or germs of stories that ended up being episodes that came from our lives or from the other writers’ lives. Someone would come in and say, “My wife just hates going to the dentist.” Then he would tell a story and we would all think about how that could be an episode. We really mined all of our lives on that show.
Jeffrey: I think all the best shows do that; the best sitcoms. I’ve heard “Everybody Loves Raymond” was like that.
Nastaran: Not that I can’t write something totally from imagination, but it always helps if I can relate to it in some level.
Neely: Have either of you written on your own since you began as a team?
Jeffrey: I have. I wrote a short humor piece for “Smoke Magazine” once – it was a cigar magazine. And I’m writing a book right now, although it’s taking forever because I’m too busy trying to get a TV show.
Nastaran: Jeffrey can operate independently of me, particularly when it comes to writing prose. I really feel like I need the other person because I can’t tell if something is good unless I have someone to bounce my ideas off of.
Neely: So how did you get staffed on “Roc?”
Jeffrey: Some things in show business never change. We knew the Executive Producer. (laughs) Now, I don’t think he would have hired us if he didn’t think we could do it because if you’re running a show you’re not going to do anybody any favors; you’ve got to hire people who are going to make you look good. We definitely did our best to deliver on the staff writer level.
Nastaran: Actually he ended up leaving the show after 3 or 4 episodes, but they kept us on for the full season.
Neely: Had you done a spec that got you hired?
Nastaran: Yes, we were hired based on a couple of specs we had written. He was a friend and he read the specs and liked them and he said, “If I ever have a show, I’ll hire you.” And he did.
Neely: Any horror stories (the names of the innocent, I mean guilty, shall be protected even thought they probably shouldn’t be) that you can discuss?
Jeffrey: Do we have horror stories? Yes! Can we discuss them? I don’t know. I can tell two short stories without naming names or identifying the shows. On one occasion we were on a show where one of the executive producers tried to break up our team because this person felt that we weren’t both valuable even though that wasn’t really true. That was kind of unpleasant, given that we were also married.
Nastaran: I know that teams split up all the time, but when you’re married, it’s a whole different game. We both ended up leaving that show because even though they were offering up a lot of money, we always agreed from the beginning that our marriage was more important. Then we had another experience on another show where the lead just hated us...
Jeffrey: ...the two leads, whose names you’ll probably never remember so I’m not going to say them, just hated us. So after we got the show picked up for a second season, we stepped down because it wasn’t worth it to run it any more. Our lives are more important than show business.
Nastaran: Honest to God, to this day, we’re not really sure exactly what it was about us that these particular actors didn’t like, but sometimes it’s just about chemistry in this business and the chemistry just wasn’t there. I will say that we’ve never had anything but good relations with the cast on the other shows we’ve been on. We’re very intent on hearing what they have to say and making sure their concerns are being addressed. Our theory is that if an actor doesn’t like or understand something, then they’re never going to be able to play it, so let’s hear them out; short of having them tell us exactly what to write.
Jeffrey: When an actor says that something is hard for him to say, I have to try to honor that and work it out. We were sort of flummoxed on that one show because we have a reputation for being collaborative, but, you know what, those were the two worst examples. For the most part, we’ve had really great experiences and the bad experiences were educational.
Neely: Let’s talk about some good experiences and mentors.
Jeffrey: I would say Bonnie and Terry Turner on “3rd Rock from the Sun.” They were great examples to us before we became showrunners. Any time you talk to a Carsey Werner writer they talk about it like summer camp. The Turners were great people, they were really down to earth; they hired wonderful people on their staffs who were thrilled to get on “3rd Rock” and they were proof that you could have fun, be collaborative, go home and have a life and a pleasant experience.
Nastaran: Actually, when we were on “3rd Rock” the Turners weren’t there full time. But the tone that was set on that show amongst the writers, amongst the cast, everyone – it was just so positive and great. So, we really admired them because we learned you don’t have to be there until 2:00 in the morning; that you can be collaborative; everyone can be nice; it doesn’t have to be about politics – and you can still deliver a show that everyone is proud of. Anyway, that was the atmosphere on “3rd Rock.” And Bonnie and Terry were at the helm of it at the beginning so it came down from them.
Jeffrey: It did.
Nastaran: Everyone was just wonderful.
Jeffrey: I would say that “The Nanny,” although I’m not sure it’s considered “a high falutin’ writing show” like was great too. To this day, people love this show It continues to get re-sold in syndication. I have no snobbery about it; it was nothing but fun. Fran Drescher was a star and when we came on “The Nanny” it was a top 10 show, but she was a very down to earth star. And this was a situation where we learned that you don’t have to be above anybody.
Nastaran: We’re still friends with her…
Jeffrey: …we’re still friends with her and a lot of those writers.
Nastaran: And we had a very very good experience when we went to New York to run “Hope and Faith” for a year.
Jeffrey: It was the third season.
Nastaran: I have to say it was the happiest time of our lives in terms of doing a show because we were doing it in New York and we had a really wonderful cast and crew. It was like one of those periods in life where everyday I’d wake up and realize I was having a good experience. And I wanted to make sure that I was aware of this so I could look back on it and know that I truly appreciated it.
Jeffrey: A lot of writers will tell you that some of their favorite shows were not necessarily shows that were highly rated or didn’t stay on the air. Ultimately ABC cancelled “Hope and Faith.” But it doesn’t matter because we had a great experience. We ran it the way we wanted to and we had a wonderful wonderful collaboration with the cast. Kelly Ripa, Faith Ford and Ted McGinley were about the most pleasant, professional people you could hope to work with. It was too much fun.
Nastaran: And the writing staff. They were all awesome.
Jeffrey: We’ve had a lot of good mentors. You learn every step of the way. Even the bad experiences will teach you. From the time we got into this, we’ve always played the game of “What would we have done differently?” We were always in a management/showrunning frame of mind even from the time we were staff writers.
Nastaran: The other show that really helped us was “According to Jim” because the Executive Producers gave us a lot of responsibilities. They let us run rooms. We were on the floor. They were very good about letting us be involved with the show. I will to this day say that I learned more on that show than any other because they just let us do it.
Jeffrey: “According to Jim” was also great because we rotated who ran the episodes. They had like four or five hundred executive producers and we all kind of took turns running the show. So one week Nastaran would do it, one week I’d do it, another week someone else would do it. We called it “driving the bus” and the agreement was that whoever was driving the bus that week made the decisions. They had three executive producers who had created the show but they were very very generous in letting other people take the reins.
Nastaran: EPs and Co-Eps.
Jeffrey: That was educational too because then you learned to give up control. You had it for a week and then it was someone else’s to run and you had to get used to not being an overseer but being a part of the team. And that was a really great learning experience that I think more showrunners forget. Some showrunners get a show and they lose their minds and think they’re Napoleon. You have to remember that you came up through the ranks and you were part of a team so you can’t forget how a team functions. You have to keep morale up and you’ve got to treat people with respect.
Neely: What did each of you do before you started working on a show? What were your goals and what did you do before you had that first writing job?
Nastaran: I actually worked for a while as a cinematographer up in Canada, mostly shooting documentaries where I got to travel all over the world. And then I came down here and went to the American Film Institute because I got a fellowship in cinematography. But then after all that, I started to look at some people I knew who were writers and I was like “these guys are making really good money; maybe I can do that.” And I just switched over. Honestly, for me, I think it was the ignorance of what was ahead that made me take the leap. There are times now when I wish I could go back to when I wasn’t afraid. Now it’s like “that’s not going to happen” because I know how it works. But when I moved here from Canada, I didn’t know any better, so I just thought, “well I guess I could write.” I had no idea of the obstacles that were ahead of me; like just how hard it is to even get an agent. That kind of ignorance was definitely bliss.
Jeffrey: I was a classical musician.
Neely: Really?! What instrument?
Jeffrey: I was a percussionist. I went to a summer internship program with the Boston Symphony Orchestra called Tanglewood and I played concerts with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa and studied with some great classical orchestral musicians. I played gigs; I played with the Boston Ballet occasionally and some local orchestras. But I looked around one day and said “I really love TV and movies and I don’t think I’m going to make a good living at this.” I had a really good memory for dialogue and themes for movies, even as a little kid. I’d go to see a movie and I’d come home and recite the entire movie obnoxiously to my family. I had reached a point where I knew I was a good musician but I was never really going to be great. I’m not even sure that I was that good; I was only good at some things. But I did it until I was about 22 and I played my last concert on the Boston Esplanade and I hung it up and moved out West. I worked on a dude ranch in Wyoming for a while and then I moved out here with 80 bucks in my pocket because somebody said to me “if you want to work on TV shows and movies, then you’d better go where they do it.”
Neely: Where did you both grow up and go to college?
Jeffrey: I grew up in Worcester, Mass. and went to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. I should have made up something like I went to M.I.T. because then you’d think I was smart, but now you just think I’m a nerd. (laughs) My family rarely comes up in our conversations but, although there is some doubt in the origins, I seem to be descended from a line of questionable Eastern Europeans who arrived in this country early in the last century.
Nastaran: When my family first came to the U.S. we lived in Ohio. Even though my father was a practicing dentist in Iran, he got a scholarship from the Iranian government to go to Ohio State University, where he specialized in prosthodontics (dictionary note: The branch of dentistry that deals with the replacement of missing teeth and related mouth or jaw structures by bridges, dentures, or other artificial devices). This was a big opportunity for him. Anyway, he decided to give up his practice in Iran, and just packed up the whole family and moved to Columbus, Ohio. So at the age of 38 he was a student again, living in student housing with a wife and two kids. That was an unbelievable leap of faith on his part. It taught me a lot. It taught me that seeking the best place to live was worth all the bumps in the road that we had along the way. And we did have a lot of bumps. That's where all the stories for “Funny in Farsi” would have come from.
After that we moved to Canada. Even though our life in the States wasn’t luxurious by any means, my father preferred living in a one-bedroom apartment and using food stamps to going back to Iran. He tried to get work in the States, and with his specialization there were plenty of opportunities for him, but he was only here on a student visa and the U.S. government wouldn’t let him stay here legally. (At the time, this government was on very friendly terms with the Shah of Iran, the government at that time.) That’s when my father, intent on not returning to Iran, decided to apply for work in Canada. McGill University in Montreal really wanted him badly, so they offered him a job if he could just get himself to the U.S./Canada border. Essentially, we all escaped to Canada in an 18 hour period. Once we got to the border McGill had arranged immigration papers for the whole family. And my father never went back to Iran. My family is all up in Canada still. Although, my father, who passed away last year, eventually became a Canadian citizen just like the rest of us, he remained infatuated with the United States. He would always say, "I love Canada, but the U.S. is still the best country in the world." I guess you always remember your first love.
I went to high school and college, Concordia University, up in Montreal. But after Concordia, I applied for a fellowship to the American Film Institute and got in. When I graduated AFI, I went back to Canada, but I only stayed a short while. Nothing against Canada, it was just that at that point I’d been exposed to the way Americans do things – all big and shiny. And everything there seemed to be on such a small scale in comparison. So I moved back down to LA. That’s when I decided to try to pursue writing and it turned out okay I guess.
Jeffrey: We’ll see.
Neely: Where or what are you guys working on right now?
Jeffrey: We’re just getting back in development. We have a bunch of projects we’re trying to get off the ground. But it just seems silly to talk about it right now because everything is still in the nascent stage.
Neely: Are you on any kind of an Overall?
Jeffrey/Nastaran: No. We’ve never had a deal. We’re not on an Overall, which is fine...
Jeffrey: ...On an Overall, they own you and can stick you on a show you don’t want to be on, so who needs that...
Nastaran: ...That’s not why we’re not on one. I’d be happy to be on one...
Jeffrey: ...Well, actually, we’re not on one because nobody gave us one.
Nastaran: But this year we’ve decided that no matter what we end up selling, we’ll definitely write something that’s just ours, that doesn’t go through the development process. Something that we want to write, that we just sit down and write on our own.
Jeffrey: I will go on record as saying that even though we’ve come across many good executives, the development process, inherently, doesn’t work. If it did, more shows would get on, stay on, and split a basically equal viewership in their timeslots. That’s not the case. And the truth is that it just doesn’t make the shows better. I just wish there was a little trust towards writers from the executive side. After all, when you hire someone to do something, you’re paying them for their particular voice, so let them do it. I would never give my surgeon surgery notes.
Nastaran: It’s funny, but of all the things we’ve ever written, the one that got the least amount of notes because everybody was on the same page from the beginning was “Funny in Farsi.” We handed in a draft before the strike, and they gave us notes, but very normal notes.
Jeffrey: They weren’t development notes, they were like clarifying notes, which were fine.
Nastaran: And ultimately the script they picked up to shoot was based on what we wrote. We got maybe one set of notes at the outline stage and one set of notes at the script stage. What it proves to me is that when everyone is on the same page at the beginning, forget about the fact that they didn’t pick it up to series, it turns out better.
Jeffrey: When everyone is going in the same direction.
Nastaran: Exactly.
Jeffrey: But when you bring something in and everyone is picking it apart, and going “this character isn’t likeable;” it’s our job to know the structure and how to make it work. If we can’t do that then they shouldn’t be hiring us or anybody.
Nastaran: I’m of a slightly different mind than Jeffrey about that process because I do think notes can help. I just think it’s more productive when everyone is going in the same direction, because with every set of notes you’re refining and making things sharper. But sometimes you hand in an outline or a script and they turn around and say, “what if it’s not about this but it’s about this?” and it’s a completely different concept. That’s when everything starts to fall apart. And we’ve had that happen, too. Thankfully it didn’t happen with “Funny in Farsi” and I think the script benefited from that.
Neely: The art of giving and receiving notes is very tricky territory. As referenced as few weeks ago, Peter Lefcourt, who is famously prickly about the receipt of such, wrote an interesting and amusing article about the subject in “Written By” magazine. (http://www.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=36445&31&p=21)
My wish for you on this topic would be a variation on the Irish Blessing:
May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May your writing be beloved and appreciated.
May the notes be clarifying and contributing.
And may those who don’t get it be struck mute so that their useless thoughts are never heard.
Thanks for spending so much time with me.
Coming Soon: "Nevermind Nirvana" by Ajay Sahgal.
